Twilight Chronicles I: Midday's Star
by Mikells
Summary: Mark Winters: Vampire. Genevieve Holmes: Human. Destined to be predator and prey, and yet they somehow overcome their natural tendencies and form a bond that few would understand. Mark, tortured by his past deeds, tries to come to grips with feelings he never thought he was capable of feeling again.
1. Quote

"_In that book which is my memory,_

_On the first page of the chapter that_

_Is the day when I first met you_

_Appear the words 'Here begins a_

_New life.'"_

-La Vita Nuova

(The New Life)


	2. Preface

**PREFACE**

They say that thirst can drive a man insane. They say that. I can say I've experienced that. It's not a pleasant sensation, not in the slightest. But when that warm liquid touches your tongue and runs down the back of your throat like an expensive cognac when you're approaching the threshold … it's like you've died and gone to heaven.

I found myself close to that threshold now. I knew I needed to drink. There was a source promising heavenly satiation not ten meters from where I stood. But I wasn't alone. There were others with me, others who would have stood in my way—one of them who _was_ in my way. And I could tell from the look in her deep, black eyes that she was feeling the burn at the back of her throat the same as I was. I could tell that she thirsted as badly as I did. So why did she stand in my way, when she could satiate herself?

Was it because I was also in the way? Was it because she suspected that when she had her back turned, I would pounce? Was it because of something deep inside her that didn't exist within me? Something … human? Or was she merely playing me?

Did she honestly think I wouldn't wait her out? I thirsted, yes, but not at the expense of my own life. I could snap her like a twig, and she would dare to stop me?

I stood there, watching her every move intently. I forgot about everything else. I forgot about the thirst. I forgot about the divine source that promised me instant relief. I forgot about the other one that stood in the way to defend it.

All there was for me was that strange woman standing a few paces from me, with the same look on her otherwise beautiful face.


	3. Chapter 1

**1. WELCOME TO DYSART**

Dysart.

Say what you will about it, some of us actually enjoy living here. It's a small town, only a few hundred kilometres from the east coast of Queensland, Australia. It also happens to be where my … family and I have made our home.

Population: three thousand, one hundred and forty-one.

Dysart is a mining town, for the most part. Many of the town's residents are employed by the Norwich Park and Saraji coal mines. But, that aside, there are still plenty of jobs inside the town, more than enough to keep the non-miners employed. Because of its general classification as a mining town, Dysart doesn't really have much in the way of self-sustained food. The nearest farms are closer to Moranbah and Middlemount, and as a result, nearly everything the town needs is imported from the major distributers in the south, and some of the farming communities to the north.

My family consists of four, though in the _strictest_ sense of the word, I guess we're not a true family. None of us share relatives that we know of. My parents' names are Jackson and Silanna Davidson. Though not my birth parents, I've known them the longest and as such I consider them to be my parents in a very real, very substantial way. My sister's name is Lisa. She's younger than me, and though I'd never really wished for a sister before I'd joined this family, knowing her has given me the appropriate appreciation for having someone like her in my life.

Lisa and I get along fairly well at the best of times. She can be a little … eccentric, but who says that that's necessarily a bad thing? She's provided an adequate replacement as a sibling, since my brothers are now both long dead. But I have come to love her … in that innocuous brother-sister way. Every time I've needed to talk to someone about anything that was bothering me, she's been there for me. Whenever I've wanted to be left alone, she's picked up on that as well and given me my space. She told me once that she grew up with six older brothers, so I guess that gave her the experience necessary to deal with someone like me in her life.

Dysart is by far not the worst place that the four of us have lived. Not too long ago, we spent several years in Warwick, to the south-west. I can't speak for what Jackson, Silanna or Lisa said about the experience, but I came to find it completely intolerable. It was more than twice the size of Dysart, but despite that, it still seemed to possess that one thing present in all small towns—everyone knew who everyone else was.

It also happens to be the town where my ex-girlfriend still lives.

Warwick was closer to farmland and nature reserves than some of the other places we've lived. But perhaps it was a little too close that it was overly convenient. Dysart avoids such convenience in favour of maintaining the necessary façade. Conveniently for me, it's also far enough away that I wouldn't dream of hearing from my ex anytime soon.

The decision to move so far north, away from Warwick, was not made for my convenience, however. Jackson and Silanna didn't just wake up one day and decide "Oh, hey. He's having trouble dealing with the ex-girlfriend. Let's move away so he'll be a little happier. Oh, I know! Let's go _north_!" No, no, no. It had been coming for a while. We'd spent perhaps a little too long in Warwick for Jackson and Silanna to get away with. Jackson was only in his late twenties, and Silanna was in her early twenties—not too much older than I, as a matter of fact—and they were passing themselves off for something closer than ten years above those numbers. As it was, some people had started to ask questions about that. The ruse wouldn't have lasted for much longer before someone started to grow suspicious beyond suspecting anti-aging cream or perfect make-up jobs to hide it.

Jackson had been a teacher in Warwick. I hadn't taken his class, of course. Something about a conflict of interest. How little they knew him, that they would think he'd mark my grades up just because he was my father. He'd been teaching Modern Histories—a subject on which he had a lot of first-hand knowledge, and in which I wasn't too useless myself.

Silanna was a doctor, and a rather brilliant one at that. Her nature gives her insights into patient conditions that most doctors would have missed. But despite that, she restrains her practice. She didn't work in hospitals, saving lives on a daily basis like a super doctor. She worked as a GP—far below her qualifications—at a private doctors' office, helping people with their problems before hospitalisation was even necessary.

But here, in Dysart, Jackson and Silanna were reversing the talents they'd been sticking too for as long as I've travelled with them … perhaps longer. Jackson was attending evening classes at a medical school, and Silanna was taking morning classes to attain a teaching degree. As for Lisa and I: school.

It was custom for the two of us to be enrolled in the local high school whenever we moved to a new place. Silanna and Jackson hardly wanted us sitting around on our butts at home doing nothing, and it wasn't exactly like we could go out and work throughout the day.

We'd been in Dysart for about two years now. We'd been enrolled in tenth grade when we'd first moved here, and were re-enrolled every year since. We were only now just about to begin the final year. It struck me as rather odd that both Lisa and I could have gotten away with applying as tenth-graders when we both looked a little older than the average teenager. Every town we went to, it was the same story: tenth through to twelfth grades, no questions asked, no suspicions raised. I'd stopped questioning the logic years ago. I suspected money was being thrown at the schools for overlooking certain inconsistencies. Not really a problem. God knew we certainly had enough.

Lisa is somewhat predictable when we attend high school. Without fail, she has always managed to pick up a loser or two as boyfriends (one at a time, of course) and without fail, each of them has decided, upon finishing school, that they were ready to move on to bigger and better things. It seemed to me that, every time, Lisa did not fall under that category. And that seriously irked me. I couldn't stand their cavalier attitude toward her, sometimes. But I reasoned that it was probably just a normal human instinct—try to be rid of the freaks as soon as possible.

In my years, I've come to realise one crucial thing about my existence: immortality is a curse. You meet so many good people—good _mortal_ people—as you cruise through your life. You form bonds of friendship, or you become lovers. And then you are forced to watch as they grew old and died while you remained young and in perfect health. Forever. And yet; knowing this, but most likely not realising how much of a toll it would take on their view on life, humans—mostly teens—crave immortality above all other desires.

There was a time, long ago, when I would have done anything, given anything, to be mortal again; to grow old, surrounded by my friends and my family, to have loved another and been loved in return, to have had a wife and children. But I had come to terms with what I was many years ago, and I had come to realise that those desires were exactly that: fantasies. They were dreams that would never come true for me. They were dreams that I didn't deserve. And dreams did not become reality just because one wished them so. I was bound to walk the earth with only others of my kind for companionship.

A friend of mine—another immortal from the southern reaches of the country—had once told me that he believed everything happens for a reason. Despite what he is, he believes that God has a plan for everyone. Human or non-human. Mortal or immortal. He said that immortality was a gift from God, and that it should never be viewed as a curse. I couldn't say that I agreed with him on the concept of a higher power, but sometimes … very few times … I liked to think that maybe there was a purpose to having lost my mortality.

But then I look back on my friend and realise just how much of a hypocrite that he is, whether he means to be or not. Though he claims that God had bestowed this gift on us, he uses that "gift" to commit the worst transgression of that belief: _Thou shalt not kill._

But now I can hear Lisa calling my name from downstairs. She's using her inside voice, as usual, but my superior hearing picks up on it as if she's standing just beside me. I'm in my bedroom on the third floor, writing this … memoire, for lack of a better term. I find that writing things down helps me to keep my sanity. The bags I've packed for my trip soon lay on the floor, waiting to be taken away.

By the way, my name is Mark Winters. I am one hundred and twenty years old, and I am a vampire. This is the story of how my life would forever be changed.


	4. Chapter 2

**2. AND THERE GOES MY FUN**

"What?" I said evenly, jumping off the prop that was my bed and thrusting the pen and pad into the open pack at the foot of the bed. I stuffed my second-best leather jacket on top of it.

I turned and stood up then in the same fluid movement; movement that did not at all feel like movement. It was too quick. A human would never have registered it.

Movement for us was like a self-fulfilling prophecy, in a way. As soon as the conscious thought was made, our body was already in position as if it had happened first. It had taken me months to get used to that kind of change when I'd first become a vampire. And even now, a hundred years after the fact, I could still find myself awed at it. But that was perhaps because I had no trouble imagining things from the human point of view.

I took a quick look at the bookshelf against one of the two solid walls of my room to see if there was anything that I was interested in bringing with me. I wanted something that I hadn't read in the past year. Even though there were more than a thousand books on my bookshelf, that wasn't an easy condition to meet.

We were going on a trip for the last weeks of our school break.

Jackson had gotten a call a few days ago from our new friends in Washington: Carlisle and Esme Cullen—though technically, _they_ lived in Ohio State now, and their son and his wife were the ones living in Washington. Their granddaughter, Renesmee Cullen, and family friend, Jacob Black, had not been seen nor heard from in over a month. It appeared as though the unforeseen incident had the entire family back in one place and they were all anxious over what it was that had caused this.

And in our world, that could be one of a great many things.

For instance, the most vampires in the world had come to realise in the past few years that the greatest threat to us in the world was our "royalty". They called themselves the Volturi. The Volturi was a trio of vampires, their wives, and their elite guards that resided in their own city— though humans didn't know it was theirs—in Italy. They considered it their sacred duty to enforce the rules—or rather, _rule_—of our kind. But in past years, many were starting to doubt that claim.

Other dangers also included the nomads; traditional vampires that roamed the world aimlessly, never tying themselves to any one feeding ground, never settling down. Most vampires today knew of Renesmee's existence, but that still didn't mean that a great many of them were pleased with it. There was always that danger that while she was out in the world, she would come across a coven or nomad that would not tolerate half-breeds such as she, or her shape-shifting companion.

And though those two were the main dangers to Renesmee and Jacob, there were still others. Shamans of the Middle East and Africa. Witches and warlocks scattered across half the globe—super rare that they were, they were equally as dangerous, equally as powerful. That power was what had kept them alive and hidden from powers such as the Volturi. Then there were the endangered werewolves of Europe and northern Asia, most likely the most deadly. But that was only if any of the stories about their existences were even true.

So in light of the disappearance of Cullen and Black alike, Carlisle and Esme were apparently calling in as many favours as they could from whatever friends they had to help look for them.

I'd pointed out to Jackson when he'd told us an unlikely an unpopular theory. "Jacob Black could have kidnapped the girl," I'd said. "They've run off to some remote island to elope, somewhere where the Cullens wouldn't dream to look for them."

But apparently, Jacob Black was a long time friend of Renesmee's mother, Bella Cullen. Apparently he would do nothing to antagonise her and her husband.

Lisa and I were eager to meet the entire family, especially Renesmee herself. Until Jackson and Silanna had told us about her two years ago, I had not even _dreamt_ that it was possible for a vampire male and a human female to … breed. Though, that wasn't saying much since I don't sleep to dream. It did make sense for there to be little record of any such births, however. Human survivors of a vampire-human mating would be _miraculous_. Vampire women could not ever get pregnant, and possibly one in ten thousand vampire men would never look upon a human woman as anything other than food.

But Jackson and Silanna had seen the proof. They'd seen Renesmee only once before, when she was but months old.

I reached the bookshelf in another one of those swift movements that weren't really movements, and I pulled three hard-covered books from appropriate shelving; William Shakespeare's _Macbeth_, H.G Wells' _War of the Worlds_, and Jules Verne's _20,000 Leagues under the Sea_. All three fit the condition that I'd set for myself, though _Macbeth_ only just scraped in under the line. I turned again, then strode back to the still-open bag at my bed and dropped the books on top of the jacket that I'd just stuffed into it.

"Get down here already, boy!" Lisa said playfully. I rolled my eyes at her tone, and headed for the bedroom door as she continued; "Usually, when I call you, you come running to see what I want. Have you so conveniently forgotten your place already?"

I smiled at her. It was a genuine, playful smile to match the mood. "Maybe I've just decided that after fifty years, I can't stand the sight of you or the sound of your voice any longer," I muttered. I heard her reply laugh as I opened the door and moved down the short hall to the staircase. "Or, perhaps, I'm preoccupied with packing for the upcoming trip," I added after I hit the second-floor landing and continued down.

"You needn't bother with that, Mark," came a second voice. Though it was no louder than the first, it reached me from further away on the floor level just as easily. It was a deep voice, and at the best of times typically calm and reassuring. Now, it just sounded … irritated?

I stopped descending the steps for a fraction of a second before continuing down to the ground floor at twice the recommended speed limit. When I reached the first floor, I was met by Jackson—the second speaker, though I was not surprised by this. Lisa was in the living room; I could hear the midday news murmuring in the background. Silanna wasn't back yet from her hunting trip.

"What's the problem?" I asked Jackson, careful not to sound too frustrated.

"I just got another call from Carlisle," Jackson replied, continuing to sound somewhat calm. Funny; I hadn't heard the phone trilling in the background. Perhaps I'd been too absorbed in my writing, or in packing, or in self reflection.

I gave Jackson a quick once-over to ascertain his mood, and I got more than just that. Jackson had been a big human, I knew from his stories. He'd been slightly overweight, with only a little muscle, and a little taller than two meters. He'd had a full, black beard and moustache running from sideburn to sideburn and covering all of his chin and cheeks. As an immortal, Jackson had kept the beard, but had trimmed it with his fingernails to a more modern, serviceable look. The smile he usually wore behind that facial hair was always contagious, and was reflected in his kind eyes. The change had stripped him away of that excess weight, liquefying the fat and reforming it into tough muscle in all the right places. Currently, his dark, cropped hair was a mess, and both of his pale hands were dirty.

I knew at once what he'd been doing before that phone call: working on a new garden for Silanna's upcoming birthday. Those two made a perfect match. It was hard not to see it in the way they always worked around each other as if they were two parts of a separated whole.

Both of my eyebrows shot up at the news of the unexpected phone call. To my knowledge, Carlisle had not mentioned any further calls regarding our visit. "Oh?"

"Jacob and Renesmee returned home yesterday afternoon," Jackson said.

And automatically, there went my mood. My surprised expression warped into an angry scowl that almost made Jackson wince. "And what, pray tell, did the mongrel have to say for himself? It had better have been a damned good explanation, if Bella and Edward didn't tear him limb from furry limb!"

"_Apparently_ Renesmee demanded that they stay in the Amazon a little while longer with the coven down there." Jackson seemed just as sceptical about this news as I was. He definitely radiated disappointment. He and Silanna had been looking forward to the chance to personally apologise to the Cullens, face-to-face, about the events of two years past. "Though," he continued thoughtfully, "I'm a little at a loss to explain why neither they, nor the Amazon sisters, mentioned this change of plans to the Cullens until just now."

"We're not going," Lisa trilled from the living room. She sounded annoyed by that fact, despite the almost jovial way she said it.

I was annoyed as well. I swore, loudly.

"Now, now," Jackson chided with a gentle chuckle. Annoyed or not, there wasn't much that could get his mood down. That annoyed me too, sometimes. "It's probably for the best that we postpone this little excursion, anyway. School will be starting back up in two weeks, and there's no way of knowing how long we'd end up staying in Forks when we get there. The Cullens, after all, are very hospitable, and the weather up there is just perfect for us."

"Weather here isn't all-too-bad at the moment, either," Lisa replied. I wondered if she was deliberately adding to Jackson's point of staying, as I glared at the wall dividing the living room from the foot of the stairs.

Jackson noticed it and chuckled again. "There'll be plenty of time to meet them, Mark. Plenty of chances," he said reassuringly. God! How could anyone be so cheerful all the time? "The holidays are just as good a time as any to visit. Perhaps even after the two of you finish school this year. It's just that right now is obviously not such a good time."

"Give me a good, solid cricket bat and five seconds and I'll teach that Jacob Black a thing or two about a good time," I mumbled testily. Jackson smiled ruefully, a little taken aback by my threat. "Well, OK then," I added, still sour. "I'll just go back upstairs and unpack everything I just packed for the trip."

"Need some help?" Lisa asked.

"No, thank you. I'm perfectly capable of emptying a few packs all by myself."

"Since when?"

I ignored the retort. Nodding solemnly, and shortly, to Jackson, I turned on my heel and began a slow climb back up the stairs at a meagre human pace.

So there went my plans for a fun-filled, action-packed week or two in Forks, Washington, apparently. There were times when I forgot completely about the friendship between Bella Cullen and Jacob Black and wondered she and her husband put up with his crap at all. They had nothing in common. Nothing at all. She was cold-blooded, and he was hot-blooded—literally. Jackson had said that Jacob and his people had higher temperatures than humans. That would certainly be uncomfortable for vampires to handle, surely.

Admittedly, I knew little of the situation in Forks with the Cullens. What little I did know, they shared the immediate area around the town with a tribe of shape-shifters that could turn into wolves, and that both sides had seemed to agree on some sort of truce. The shifters had sided with the Cullens against the Volturi two years ago, which would have made things so much more interesting had the confrontation actually resulted in a fight. But as to the particulars of the truce, I was clueless. In fact, we all were.

That was another part of our reason for wanting to visit the Cullens; so that we could learn more about our new friends in the north. I knew that Jackson in particular was very curious about that strange alliance.

But, alas, postponed.

I shoved the door to my room open so hard that I bounced back after I passed it. Lisa was sitting on the edge of the prop bed I so rarely even touched, smiling up at me.

"What?" I demanded. She must have passed me on the stairs when I'd been too deeply in thought to notice it. My bags looked like they'd been unmoved. All three of them were still sitting where I'd left them, but they were all now wide open, crumpled, and empty. I looked back up at Lisa and scowled. "I _said_ I could do it myself!"

"It took you long enough just to get back up the stairs, let alone unpack your things. I had serious doubts that you _could_ do it," she replied smartly, still grinning like an idiot. "I figured that I would do you a favour and get it all done by the time you made it up here. A thank you would be the appropriate way to respond to that."

"So why are you still here?" I snarled, ignoring her last statement. I headed for the mahogany bookstand and pulled _Macbeth_ back down from the third-from-top shelf. I slumped down onto the nearby lounging chair and opened the book to the beginning: _Act I, Scene I_.

"To talk, I suppose," Lisa replied. From her tone, I gathered that at least she wasn't smiling any more.

"What's he done now?" I asked without looking up.

"Who?"

"Adam," I replied, continuing to read. Compartmentalisation was such a wonderful skill.

Adam Pollock was Lisa's current attempt at a relationship. He was a member of the school's football team and widely popular, especially with the girls. Though, none of the girls at school seemed overly annoyed that Lisa was the one that he'd decided was the most interesting. I often wondered to myself how long that would last, if he would be yet another person off to "bigger and better things." I didn't like him. Lisa didn't care.

"Usually you only use that tone when it's either boyfriend trouble for you, or suspected girlfriend trouble for me," I pointed out, showing how well I knew her. "And since I haven't had a girlfriend for the past two years …"

"Adam has been behaving himself," Lisa replied stiffly. I peered over the edge of my book at her. She looked back at me through dark, slightly narrowed eyes that told me that I'd hit a nerve. I went back to my reading. "I actually wanted to talk to you about Miss Karson."

"Simone?" I peered over the top of the book again with a frown as I turned the page without looking at it. Lisa had a hopeful half-smile hitched into place, and her head was tilted to the side ever-so-slightly that her sandy curls hung loose over her right shoulder. "Forget it. That topic is not open for discussion." And then I looked back down at my book again.

"Why the hell not?" Lisa demanded indignantly. "Listen, Mark; you've been moody and reclusive ever since the two of you split up. You hardly leave your room, save for going to school or hunting. I know that you loved—"

Wrong move. "I did _not_ love Simone," I snarled without looking up.

"What I meant to say was that I know you cared a great deal for her," Lisa continued without missing a beat. "You let her in, and the only things you kept from her is the nature of what you—we—are, and the _details_ of your human life. Though, I suppose that you'd have even told her that at the right time."

By "details", Lisa meant the fact that I'd been born over a hundred years ago. So I'd downplayed a lot of my mannerisms and behaviours that seemed so strange to Simone as the way I'd been brought up. Ironically, that much was true. It had been her that had made the assumption that that upbringing had been somewhat more recent.

I grunted to show my disapproval of the conversation, but Lisa ignored me. Typical. "The fact that she was dishonest with you must hurt," she pressed. "More so considering that she passed _my_ acceptance, and you know how good a judge of character I am."

"Is this going somewhere?" I looked over the book again at her.

"I'm just trying to get you to talk about it, is all," Lisa said defensively.

"Why?" I pressed, closing the book gently around my finger. "You know that she was dishonest, and you know that she was unfaithful. Moreover, you know that it hurt me. What more do you want from me: a song and dance to sum up that she was a lying, cheating tramp that deserves whatever crap gets thrown her way?"

"Essentially, yes." Lisa nodded, her eyes losing that hard look she got when she was being defensive. "Like you said; I know all that stuff already. I just want to hear it from you. You've been letting it eat at you for the past two years. You can't just bottle it up for the rest of eternity for the simple reason that you don't want to deal with it. Everyone has to face their problems at some point in their lives. Why live in misery, letting what she did forever get you down?"

"OK then, Lisa, let's face facts then, shall we?" I said hotly. It was amazing that, though I said this with less heat, it actually made her flinch at the force I put behind the words. "Women are untrustworthy, deceitful, and entirely unworthy of men's affections. They think that love is just a toy or a joke that they can throw around like it's a javelin, uncaring on who may be struck down by their efforts."

Lisa bristled at my sexist attack. "Now _that_ was entirely uncalled for!" she replied indignantly.

She was right. Now that I'd said it, the anger abated enough that I truly regretted it. Silanna would have been so crushed to hear me say that. "You, my dear, are not a woman. You're my sister. That's an entirely different category altogether."

"The superhero category?" she asked hopefully.

"Not even close," I replied quickly. So help me, I actually smiled. We sat there staring at each other for several moments before I breathed a sigh and broke the silence. "Look … when I feel like talking to someone about the failed exploits with Simone Karson, rest assured that you'll be the one I come to." It just wasn't the same discussing with Silanna my failed relationships with humans.

"Do you promise?" she said.

"You have my oath," I said genuinely.

She sat there for a minute, as if trying to ascertain if my oath was breakable. I knew that it wasn't. I'd never made one lightly. Apparently satisfied that she'd gotten the truth, she got up from the bed and strode gracefully over to the door.

She stopped, hand on the door holding it open, and then looked over her shoulder to me. "We're leaving tomorrow night."

It took me only a second to catch onto her meaning. "It's a bit early, isn't it?" I quizzed. Our usual hunting excursion wouldn't be for another few days yet. I didn't feel the particular urgency to go on one anytime soon, and though Lisa's eyes were dark, there was still a little gold in them.

"I've been exerting quite a bit of energy this week." I snorted in disbelief, and she scowled. "We both have. I don't know if you've looked in the mirror—"

"Why would I ever have cause to look in the mirror?" I joked.

"—but you're starting to show signs of the thirst a lot sooner than usual," Lisa continued as if I hadn't interrupted her. In her mind, I probably hadn't. "With school starting soon, Mark, we need to start getting back into a regular cycle of feedings."

"I think I've smelled all there is to smell in this town, Lisa," I said dryly. I was aware, however, that her mentioning the thirst had brought on a sudden flame in the back of my throat. "Believe me when I say there's nothing here that's appealing enough for me to … slip."

"I don't care. I'm not going to have you ruining this for us. I like Dysart." And then she was gone.

I shrugged as my door whispered to a gentle close, and then reopened _Macbeth_ to the page I had reached. I started to read.


	5. Chapter 3

**3. MY OLD MATE, MILO**

"You know, you never actually got around to telling any of us why you were so glad to be rid of Warwick."

Lisa had been asking questions pretty much since we'd left Dysart yesterday afternoon. We had gone a few hours west to one of our regular hunting grounds and decided that while we were out here, it wouldn't be too bad an idea to camp out for the night. We'd already drunk until we were half full, and we figured that we'd fill up on the way back home.

I was starting to regret the whole camping decision, though, and I didn't regret much from my hundred and twenty years. The sooner we got home, the sooner I could lock myself back in my room and avoid all the incessant questioning and unceasing attempts to make me talk about things I'd rather forget.

Spending time with Lisa can be both refreshing and detrimental. On the one hand, she's an excellent conversationalist. Get a topic started and she'll have you talking about it until the cows come home. But if the topic was left to Lisa to come up with, there was a fairly good chance that it would end up being something that would annoy me to the furthest extent of my patience. And to have lived with her for fifty years, one required a _lot_ of patience.

I had been avoiding any conversation with Lisa in the one-on-one sense since our talk about Simone Karson and women in general the previous day. However, I knew all the while that when we were due to leave for our hunt, she'd likely start up on it again, and I would be hard-pressed to wriggle my way out of it.

Throughout the excursion so far, I'd managed to reply with short answers, or grunts of acceptance or recognition. But she kept pressing the subject, trying to draw out longer responses to keep the conversation alive. She wasn't satisfied by my short answers.

I half considered letting her go it alone and dashing south to one of the other spots that we regularly hunted in. I could have done with the peace and quiet. I knew, however, that she would follow, and pushed the thought from my mind.

The sound of the crackling fire was the only one of those that filled the silences between Lisa's inquisitorial questioning. I poked at the flames with a dry stick, and listened to the crackle and the snap, and the background sounds of the desert.

There was a snake nearby; a King Brown, if my nose served me right. But I wasn't bothered enough by it to want to pinpoint its exact location. Cicadas chirped from the bark of the few dead trees around the barrens, not too far from our campsite. A couple of mosquitoes buzzed around in Lisa's vicinity, further from the fire than I was. They wouldn't bother either of us, though they were sure gutsier than the rest of the wildlife in their proximity.

I looked up at the stars overhead; so many more than I would have seen from home. It's funny that; you can see more stars in the night sky when you're not surrounded by the lights and pollution of the big cities and towns, despite the fact that those same lights were supposed to aid human sight in the dark. Bored, I started to pick out all the constellations that I could recognise.

Lisa interrupted me. "Earth to Mark," she said.

Reluctantly, I tore my gaze away from the dark and sparkly heavens and looked over to where she was sitting. I could see perfectly the snow white of her face and her hands; the rest of her was obscured by the tight black clothes that she had chosen to wear. I could see those too, but no human would in this light.

I was no different in the colour of my clothes of choice. When hunting at night, the colour black often came in handy in avoiding accidental sightings by humans operating in the darker hours. I was wearing a black, long sleeved turtleneck with long black pants. An equally black and sleeveless coat hung from my shoulders, open at the front, almost to the soles of my boots. Lisa was wearing a similar, though decidedly more feminine, top paired with tight leggings that were tucked into her knee-high boots. I had black gloves on my hands to cover them up. So to any human spotting me in the dark, I would appear to be no more than a disembodied head floating around. I almost laughed at the imaginings that brought out in me.

"What? Yes," I replied, not really bothering to recall whatever it was that I was even replying to.

"I said," Lisa started, face hard, "that you never actually told any of us why you were so keen to leave Warwick."

"If this is another attempt to get me to discuss Simone again—" I started. She cut me off.

"Not at all, actually," she assured me. "I rather got the impression that you enjoyed living down here. I mean, you were happy living there, long before you even met Simone Karson."

"I was mistaken."

"I don't think so," Lisa countered smugly.

"Lisa," I said abruptly. I threw the useless stick in my hand into the fire and watched the flames catch onto it. It started to burn, and the snapping and crackling of the fire increased. "What is the point in asking questions of me, if you are just going to tell me that my answers are not the truth? If you don't want to listen, then simply do not ask the questions!"

"It's not that I don't want to listen to you. It's just that I would much prefer to hear the truth," Lisa snapped. "We're out here for the rest of the night. There's no Jackson, no Silanna … no one except for us. So why don't you spend some of that time _talking_ to someone for a change?"

"Lisa …"

"Mark!" she countered, getting quickly to her feet and taking an aggressive step toward the fire. It wasn't so smart for her to get too close to it. Fire was deadly to us—really deadly. We were like fuel to a fire. Once it touched us it went wild. I'd seen it happen once or twice, and if I were capable of sleep those memories would have haunted me as nightmares. "We're family. Why won't you—?"

She stopped herself dead then as the light breeze blowing through the valley changed direction. Suddenly, she was hissing, low and dangerously. The change in wind had brought a slightly cold scent up to us from the south, and it had me on my feet as well, wondering who or what it could possibly have been.

I looked to Lisa for an eighth of a second. Her eyes were wide with surprise, and were darting from side to side quickly, searching the distance. I spun on the spot myself, scanning the distance with my own eyes for any signs of movement, approach or retreat. There were none yet that I could see, which meant that whoever or whatever belonged to the scent was hiding, or they were much further distant.

As I continued to search the darkness from my place by the fire, I reached out in front of me with my palm to the ground. Chancing a brief look around, I saw that the sticks and rocks around me were rising up from the door. The same held true around the rest of the campsite as my concentration flared and grew. I focussed my mind, ignoring the psychic stabs that told me that I was pushing the limits of my abilities, and flipped my palm up toward the sky. The collection of makeshift weapons around us came together in small formations of projectiles, hovering above the ground as if by their own will.

Not all vampires were the same, as I'd learned so long ago. Some of us, when we were reborn into this life, possessed powerful gifts beyond the super strength and senses that all of us had. I had heard from Jackson and Silanna that the Cullens had a psychic and a telepath amongst their number, and I'd heard stories from around the globe of other abilities that seemed impossible. Although I had a gift, I had never met another vampire yet who did. Apparently, those of us that possessed such gifts attained them because, as mortal humans, we had had some latent form of it.

Lisa hadn't quite gotten a "special" gift, but her vampire sight was easily ten times more powerful than any other vampire I had ever met. Sometimes, she swore she could see the paths people had taken weeks after those paths had been travelled and trampled by other traffic. Powerful stuff. I gathered, if the latent-theory held true, that her eyesight must have been excellent as a human.

As for me? I had been gifted with something I'd thought more impossible … and yet it was a lot more useful: telekinesis. I had no memory of any latent form of it from my human days, but if that theory was right, then I must have had it in some form for it to be as it was now. I had only discovered it perhaps a decade after Lisa had been added to our "family", and even after forty years of practice, I hadn't mastered the concentration aspect of it yet.

"What do your elf eyes see?" I asked Lisa, ripping the line from one of the Lord of the Rings movies; though I couldn't remember which.

"Nothing yet," Lisa replied, turning on the spot to look past me, and the scanning around.

"Then use your other senses," I suggested.

I resisted the urge to rip a line from Star Wars then, though I'd had the perfect lead-in.

Right then, I would gladly have traded in my wicked telekinesis for an even more awesome telepathy.

I breathed in deeply through my nose at the same moment that Lisa did, and took in the various scents of the desert from the south. The wind direction hadn't changed again yet. I could smell the distant eucalypts, continually dragged through the air to us on the wind. I could also smell the dust and the dirt of the ground, the stiff dryness of the rocks and boulders around, the rotting logs at the campsite. I could smell the nest of slumbering snakes and the families of kangaroos and dingoes around that had settled for the night. And I knew that Lisa smelled them all too.

But still, there was that last scent, a scent not too dissimilar to our own. It most definitely wasn't human. It didn't fuel the intense burn in the back of my throat like human blood always did. But it had a cold and bitter bite to it, just like a vampire would. Almost like ammonia.

"You smell that?" Lisa asked me. I nodded and smelled the air again. I frowned when I realised that it triggered some sort of familiarity within me. It wasn't just that it was a vampire's scent. I knew _this_ scent. "Not human. Vampire."

"Jackson and Silanna wouldn't—"

"Oh!" a familiar voice cried from behind me. "Jesus H. Christ, Mark!"

I spun around to see a new figure in the camp sight, standing between me and Lisa, but making sure to keep a safe distance from the fire. Lisa had also spun toward the newcomer, and her face was masked with both curiosity and distrust.

"You don't recognise my scent? I really am very offended!"

The indignity in his tone was false when he spoke, forced with the intention of being jovial. I could tell this. Lisa, it seemed, could not. She tensed into a half-crouch, ready to spring if the newcomer attacked. For all she knew, he could have been a member of the Volturi Guard. We were constantly on the lookout for them in case they decided they were going to do away with Jackson and Silanna. I waved Lisa off dismissively, though, as I studied the newcomer's face.

I _did_ recognise him, I now saw. The deep burgundy eyes, with the telltale brightness of a recent feed, the strong, not-quite-innocent featured face framed by a wild mane of red-brown hair. His lips were curved into a sly grin as he looked from me to Lisa, and then back again, assessing the situation. His strong arms were crossed over his chest, and the way he stood was almost defiant and challenging, as if daring either one of us to attack him that instant.

He wore a similar outfit to my own, though it looked only slightly frayed and dusty grey with no sleeves or gloves. His coat was done up at the front, and he was barefooted.

The collection of makeshift weapons around me fell to the ground as I released my psychic hold on them and lowered my hand to my side again.

"Milo?" I said, uncertain. "Milo Dervidge?"

"One and the same," the newcomer said with a wide grin. He took a single, careful step toward me, arm extended in greeting. I took one step forward myself and grasped him by the wrist, smiling back and ignoring the sharp looks that Lisa was shooting at me over his shoulder.

"How have you been, old friend?" I said. I sat back down on the log I had been sitting on before and gestured for Milo to take a seat as well.

He sat down cross-legged on the ground between Lisa and I, and leaned back heavily against a large rock jutting up behind him. "As a matter of fact," he said, flexing his biceps, "I'm excellent to be sure."

His eyes flickered over everything at the campsite; the fire, Lisa, the ground, Lisa, me, Lisa, the logs, Lisa, and the rocks. Lisa remained standing where she was, staring down at Milo with distrust having entirely replaced her earlier curiosity. If she noticed just how many times his eyes flickered over to her, she made no sign of it.

"If I was a suspicious bloodsucker," Milo started slowly, looking me straight in the eyes, "I could say that your mate here is about to get violent on my poor old self."

The corner of his mouth twitched back up into a smile when he saw me flinch at the aside. At the word "mate", Lisa let loose with a low, deadly snarl of disgust and warning.

"She's … uh … not my mate," I corrected uneasily, not taking offense to her reaction.

"Oh?" Milo's eyebrows shot up in genuine surprise. I nodded my confirmation. "I just assumed … two bloodsuckers out in the middle of the desert, alone, possibly hunting by the fact that you're as far from civilised population as possible …" He turned to look at Lisa. "My apologies, dear lady. Would you please sit? I mean neither of you any harm, and you're making me nervous."

Lisa looked to me first, and then nodded stiffly and sat down on her own dead tree trunk, hugging her legs to her chest.

"If not mate …?" Milo queried.

"Sister," Lisa and I replied at the same time. I continued alone. "In a way. Jackson and Silanna were unhappy to see the pain I was going through when Brett died—you remember that period, don't you?—and Silanna had heard that there was a young girl dying at the local hospital. Untreatable, they said of her. To Silanna, the answer seemed simple enough. She pretended to be Lisa's family doctor, and with no actual family around to dispute that, she was given access to her right away." I shot Lisa a cheeky grin before I continued. "But she can be a real pain in the ass sometimes."

She stuck her tongue out at me.

"I gathered, from what little I heard," Milo admitted with a chuckle. "But come on! They only wished to give you a sister? Mate, we both know that that's a cock-and-bull story right there."

Lisa growled, and her eyes flashed dangerously, but I headed her off before she could say anything. "Yes, OK. Silanna wanted to think that there'd be more between us than just a sibling companionship, but it was us that ultimately decided what it was that we needed from each other." I paused, and then frowned. "I'm surprised I didn't mention any of this when I saw you in Sydney."

"So am I, actually," Milo said with a shrug. Lisa growled low again. "She's a bit … touchy."

"You're a stranger to her," I pointed out. "And, you know, keeping with the whole human façade, we've got school starting soon so …" I trailed off. "And to top that off, the four of us were planning a trip to Washington to see the Cullens"—this made Milo frown—"but that was cancelled last minute."

"Ah. Well I apologise."

Remembering then that I'd been remiss on my manners, I mentally slapped my forehead and turned to Lisa. "Lisa, this is a friend of mine from down in the southern states—a nomad. Milo Dervidge. Milo, Lisa Michelson. She's going by Davidson publicly, however." I introduced the two quickly, gesturing from one to the other. Milo bowed his head respectfully, and Lisa merely inclined hers politely. She still didn't entirely trust him, and that made her smart.

"So, Milo …" I started after a moment of silence. "What brings you this far up north? I thought we agreed that you wouldn't come up any further than the Geraldton-Dalby line without calling ahead, and I would do the same going south."

"You didn't give me your new mobile number," Milo replied evenly, "and I _did_ leave a message on your landline this afternoon, but I guess you'd already left."

"We left just after midday," I said. Despite Lisa wanting to leave closer to an appropriate dinner hour, I'd vetoed her and we'd left early.

"Well, then, it should be quite the treat getting back to a cheerful message from an old pal, shouldn't it?" Milo said. "To be honest, I just wanted to see a familiar face."

"Any particular reason?" Lisa asked.

"Ah …" And here it was. The hesitation in his voice was more potent than acid. "Well, see, that's my slight problem there and then, isn't it?"

I groaned. "What have you gotten yourself into this time, Milo?" I demanded.

"Not so much anything _recent_," he said. But the way he said it had my mind running through all of the things he'd done to tick off other nomads—and then subsequently tried to pin on me. "Just … something I was unfortunate enough to get tangled up in a couple of years ago."

"Oh, no!" I groaned again. It fell into place now. His sudden frown when I'd mentioned the Cullens, and now his apparent distress. "Tell me this isn't something to do with that thing with the Cullens?"

"Can't do that," Milo said. "At least, I'm not sure."

"Not sure?" Lisa demanded hotly.

"I … I _feel_ like I'm being watched. Or followed. I don't know how much your friends told you about that day."

Oh that fateful day, I thought bitterly.

The Volturi, purportedly the meters of our justice and the keepers of our peace and secret, had all but destroyed their credibility on that day. They'd called for a great many vampires from around the globe to bear witness as they dealt their justice to the Cullens, who had at the time been accused of the most heinous crime: the creation of an Immortal Child.

The abominations were forbidden because they couldn't be controlled, couldn't be taught. Their mental processes before the change weren't advanced enough for learning. But someone had seen Bella Cullen with a child that had clearly not been human, and reported it straight to the Volturi before an explanation could be given. The child in question had turned out to be a legitimate hybrid, an unexpected result of the consummation of Edward and Bella Cullen's marriage.

Silanna and Jackson, and Milo I'd heard, had all attended the event. Silanna and Jackson had been distraught over it from the start. They were both kind souls, and neither of them really wished any harm on t he Cullens. But law was law, and they both respected that those that broke the law needed to be punished, regardless of who they were.

As it had turned out, the Volturi had been scheming to destroy the Cullens before they'd heard about the child. Though, understandably, they denied any such allegations. According to Silanna and Jackson's recounting of that day, one of the Cullens' witnesses, a revolutionary nomad by the name of Garrett, had called the Volturi out in front of everyone. He'd spent time with the Cullens, enough time to know the kinds of people they were. He'd stated for all to hear that the Volturi were using excuses; that their true purpose was not to mete out justice, but to ignore it by destroying what they perceived to be a threat to their _domination_ of our people. He pointed out to them all that, having heard the truth behind the child's origins, the Volturi had tried again and again to force a confrontation.

A vampire's life had been lost. What had Jackson said they'd called it? "_Punished for bearing false witness_." It made me sick. And when that attempt had failed, they'd tried again, by decreeing that Renesmee Cullen was too dangerous, too much a potential liability to be left alive.

But something else had also been revealed by Garrett, and though it would have been circumstantial under other circumstances, there had been two vampires present that day, one witness on each side of the conflict, that had the ability to tell the truth from a lie. And Garrett had warned them all that, after the humiliation the Volturi had suffered that day, even if they destroyed the Cullens, they would not let their witnesses leave to spread the news.

"Tell me you're kidding?" I hissed.

"I don't know! That's why I wanted to see a friendly face before I go."

"Go? Go where?"

"Overseas for a while. If I still feel that way, then I'll know I'm being followed. It might just be another nomad that's tracking me for a decent food source. God knows, I have good taste." As if to accentuate his point, he sucked his fingers noisily. Lisa grimaced, her nose wrinkled in disgust.

"I know a place you can go if it turns out you _are_ being followed," I said carefully. Should I drag the Cullens back into this? They had more resources than I did to determine if Milo was just being paranoid.

"Forks?" he said dubiously.

"They'd be better equipped to help. You might just be being paranoid."

"Maybe," Milo said uncertainly. "Maybe."

"Do you know where you'll be headed?" I asked curiously. A few minutes had passed, enough, I felt, that I could safely change the topic.

"Definitely not Italy!" he said with a nervous chuckle. "Maybe France or Germany, though. I'd love to see the Eiffel Tower, and the Statue of Liberty, and the Kremlin."

"So, Russia as well, eh?" Lisa said mockingly.

"Hey, in Russia, Kremlin find you," Milo returned with a grin. "Want to come with, pretty lady?" He added with a wink. Lisa pointedly scowled and looked away from him, drawing a laugh from me. "I guess that's a no then, huh?" he said.

"That's a no," I clarified for him.


	6. Chapter 4

**4. ALMOST PERFECT DISASTER**

We spent the rest of that night with Milo. If he was being followed, his pursuer wasn't too close behind him, because they made no appearances throughout the night. Then he left, claiming that he was going to go a little further north to visit a couple of vampires he'd been running with before I'd first met him. Lisa and I headed home, stopping to gorge ourselves on a couple of kangaroos and dingoes along the way.

Milo was right about one thing, at least. When we got back home, there _was_ a message on my landline—from Milo. It was just a brief message to say hello, and to remind me that it had been a long time since he'd caught up with me. There'd also been some chagrin about not being given my new mobile number (I'd rectified that when he spent the night with us) and then finally that he was stopping by for a brief visit.

I'd erased it after listening to it, and then checked my mobile. Sure enough, there was a fresh message from Milo:

_See you in a few months._

I'd used the number from the message to save his contact info into my mobile, and then tossed it aside.

The first thing Lisa had done when we'd returned home was to go straight to Jackson and tell him what Milo had told us. Jackson, it seemed, wasn't overly concerned with the possibility of the Volturi tracking him down. He knew it was a possibility, but, forever the optimist, he preferred to think that they wouldn't. After all, he hadn't exactly kept word of the Forks incident to himself after he'd returned. Word had spread so far by now that it would be pointless for the Volturi to track down their witnesses unless they just wanted to express their dissatisfaction with them.

School was due to start at the beginning of next week, and Lisa and I still did not have new books, or replacement pens and pencils from last year. Lisa was out for the day at a friend's place in town. Because of that fact, it looked like I was going to be the sucker that was stuck with driving down town to the store to fetch what we needed for school.

How convenient.

It's been that way since we decided, decades ago, to start attending schooling. She always spent those last several days before school started away from the house—at a friend's or "camping" in the bush—and I would be left to fetch all the equipment we still didn't have. It bothered me a little that she as yet had not volunteered once to do that duty, but it didn't bother me enough to tear her a new one for it.

At school, I tried to minimize my interactions with everyone else. This time through, I actually had one true human friend, which was rare. But outside of school, I didn't mind a little interaction so much. I think it's because it's a lot less frequent. Even a town as small as Dysart allowed for the random chance of not passing someone by every minute of the day.

I pulled into a vacant spot at the Dysart Garden Plaza swiftly and switched off the engine. I sat there for a couple of minutes, drumming a random beat on the steering wheel lightly with my fingers before I unclipped my seatbelt.

To be honest, there are times when I legitimately wonder why I still wear the thing. I've long realised that I have the reflexes to avoid an accident on the roads, and even in the unlikely event that I _was_ in one, I was durable enough to come away from it completely unscathed. But those errant thoughts are few and far between. Mostly, I knew that if I _was_ in a serious accident and came away from it without so much as a scratch on me; I knew there would be questions. Uncomfortable questions. Lots of uncomfortable questions. Seatbelts are just another prop in our façade of being human.

I quickly checked the shade coming from the building and was glad to note that it covered the area of the lot where I was parked. I sighed, lucky that I hadn't decided to make the trip earlier when I would have been at the risk of sun exposure. I wasn't the only person at the plaza this afternoon; someone was bound to have noticed the effect.

The car's radio died with the engine, and I removed the key from the ignition and popped the door open. The air outside the car was cool and pleasant, much as it always was. Even in summer, a cool breeze could often be felt wafting gently throughout most of Dysart, coaxing residents outdoors to enjoy it. Perhaps it was the almost-constant overcast that was behind the breeze. Perhaps it wasn't. Either way, it wasn't as if I heard many humans complaining.

Today was unusually sunny, which is why I was being cautious about exposure. It's rare for the sun to be out for a full day, but so far it's been doing OK. Silent curses ran through my mind every few seconds.

I shut the car door behind me and keyed the remote locking on my keychain before I slipped the keys into my pocket and turned to walk purposefully toward the plaza. I made sure to keep my speed down to the human norm for appearances, though it tested my patience a little. The glass doors slid open with a whir at my approach, and I stepped across the threshold into the unnecessarily air-conditioned building. On instinct from the past two years, I homed in on the IGA store and dashed inside barely slow enough to pass for human. I snagged a shopping basket as I raced by the stack.

I recognised a face at one of the registers on my way in. Burt Tomlinson, a boy from school that would be starting eleventh year, was behind the counter just past the express lanes. He was seeing to a pair of fast-talking girls I knew by scent were also school-goers.

Burt looked over the girls' heads at me and smiled warmly. I nodded politely in return, but Burt's pointed gaze had drawn the attention of the girls he was serving. They turned also to look at me, and then I realised exactly who they were.

One of them was the eleventh grade Jenna Ivanov, a girl who had been born in the Ukraine. Her parents had fled the country to Australia a year after she had been born and they had lived in Dysart ever since then. Her friend was a girl in my year level; Annabel Redman. She was a fair looking redhead originally from somewhere in Victoria, and had only moved to Dysart a year after me and my family had. I knew that much about them from unintentional eavesdropping at school. It was hard not to do that when you had super hearing.

Annabel blushed when she saw me staring back at them, and both girls turned back to the counter, giggling to themselves. I looked away with a bored sigh and headed down an aisle I knew led to the stationery supplies.

With my exceptional hearing, I listened as Burt bade the girls a good day and they left the store, still giggling. I sighed again. I seemed to illicit reactions like that from many of the women in the town—and not just the school-goers. So did Jackson, as a matter of fact. I knew that it was because of our physical appeal, and that's not just me being conceited, it's me stating a fact.

We vampires have a need to be beautiful. It's one of the mechanisms that help to lure in our natural prey the same way that a pitcher plant lures in the insects on which it feeds. However, to those like myself and my family who have chosen not to drink of human blood, our unnatural, vampire-given beauty is more of a curse than an aid. We have no need to attract humans the way we do.

I'd hardly noticed that I'd reached the stationery aisle. I bent at the waist to grab a stack of exercise books from the bottom shelf of the rack in front of me for Lisa—books with pink covers and ornate little flowers in the top opening corner—and an equal stack from the shelf above it—books with black and yellow vertical stripes on the cover. I ignored the sound of footsteps that approached the aisle, and then walk by it.

I moved along to another section of the aisle and grabbed packets of eraser-tipped 2B pencils and ballpoint pens of all three primary colours—red, black and blue. I also grabbed a couple of new staplers and a couple of boxes of staples to go with them. Rulers were unnecessary for us; we were quite capable of drawing perfectly straight lines without them and just as capable of making measurements of length at a single glance. Other stationery that we would likely need—compasses, erasers, scissors (which we rarely used anyway)—were reusable from past years and therefore already accessible at home.

I turned and I was just starting out of the aisle when it all changed. The air conditioning unit on the wall on the far side of the store breezed past, and I froze in an instant, almost statue-like.

Never … _never_ in my unnaturally long life had I ever come across a scent like that before; a scent so potent that despite feeding relatively recently, the back of my throat burned in agony and my teeth and the inside of my mouth were instantly coated in a thin film of eager venom. I turned very slowly to look down the aisle to the back of the store, instinctually seeking the source of that scent.

It was another customer, late teens, a little further down the aisle in the magazine section. And if my nose hadn't told me any better, I'd have sworn by her beauty that she was a vampire.

Her hair was a warm, chocolaty brown, with just the barest touch of copper-red. It hung loosely in waves and curls down past her face and around her shoulders. Her skin was only slightly paled, as if it had not been touched enough by the rays of the sun, and it looked so smooth that I barely registered it as human. She was slim of build, with the most perfect curves I've ever seen on a human, but also hinting unmistakeably—at least to me—that those curves hadn't come naturally, that she'd had to work hard for them. Hey eyes, though I could see only the one from my angle, were a dark brown, deep and thoughtful and framed by long lashes. She wore very little makeup, likely to add a touch of colour to her otherwise pale texture, and I could smell a touch of perfume, but nothing overdone—and most certainly, _certainly_, not nearly enough to colour her natural scent.

And it was that scent, that undeniable hint of her humanity, which both held my attention and made me ravenous.

Her scent was strangely, and strongly, a perfect combination of floral and fruity; like a grove of peaches surrounded by a multicoloured garden of exotic flowers. Some aspects of the garden I could identify easily; rose and lilac and daffodil and violet and lily. They were scents that I had grown used to in the gardens that Jackson and Silanna tended at our various residences. But for the most part, I was clueless.

The smell wasn't unpleasant in the slightest, if I discounted the burn it fuelled in the back of my throat. But it was unknown, and it was unexpected all the same.

But most of all, it was very, very strong. I closed my eyes and inhaled deeply on the next pass of the air conditioner's fan, drowning myself in the essence of this stranger. It was stupid of me; very, intensely stupid. And I knew that I shouldn't have done it. But it was pure instinct. It was something that vampires had evolved to do: hunt by smell.

When I opened my eyes again to look at the strange young woman, I realised just how much that her scent had affected my control. I could see the blood vessels under her delicate, pale-looking skin, pumping fresh, red, delicious life juices through every inch of her being. I could hear her heart beating beneath her breast, slow and steady, teasing me with its rhythm. Had she not noticed me staring yet? No? Good.

Wild thoughts run rampant through my mind; unbidden and controlled and unwanted thoughts. My senses were telling me that there were only a dozen customers in the entire store, and three employees manning the checkout registers. It would only take me a minute, maybe two, to kill and feed from everyone. A quick flick of the wrist and the satisfying snapping of bone and cartilage as I broke each of their necks in a single-handed grip. The lightning-fast flash of my teeth before they pierced the skin and sinew and tore into the jugular as a knife would through butter.

There would be no witnesses. There would only be this strange girl and myself left, and no one else alive to report what I had done, no one to see me lose control of myself in the face of this mounting desire to have the stranger's blood coat my tongue, my throat, as I bled her dry. She wouldn't even see it coming. No human could keep up with that kind of carnage.

Maybe I would prolong her ordeal as I fed; bleed her slowly enough that her young and thriving heart would pump her juices into my eager and waiting mouth for an hour or two before it gave her up to me altogether. Once I started to feed, she would know something was wrong, and the adrenaline would increase the blood flow, making the feeding even more satisfying and drawn out.

Then there was the potential for more customers to enter the store as I fed. Would I give them enough time to see the carnage, the dead bodies at the registers, and the other dead customers scattered around the store? Or would I stop my feeding frenzy, tear myself away from that girl just long enough to dispatch those witnesses too? If I stopped feeding mid-point from even one victim, I would be running the undesirable risk that my venom would begin to spread through them, starting its slow contamination of the delicious blood. I would have to feed faster to catch up to it and prevent it, thus sacrificing the desire to draw it out.

On the other hand, maybe I would let them see the dead bodies. Maybe I would take my prize, the strange beautiful girl, into the loading dock at the back of the store and drink from her there in the relative privacy. Potential witnesses could be allowed to report what they had seen. By the time the authorities arrived on the scene, and by the time they got around to checking the loading dock, I would be long gone and satiated.

I could feel the venom in my mouth, fighting to combat my continual swallowing and overwhelm me at the sheer excitement of these dangerous thoughts.

Fifteen people dead; all completely exsanguinated. It would make headline news for the local and district papers at the very least. Perhaps even the state news—perhaps countrywide. Maybe even the TV news stations would get involved. Me and my family would have to leave Dysart to avoid suspicion and subsequent exposure. Worst still, we would have to go into hiding to avoid the wrath of the Volturi.

But a part of me, at that particular point, didn't really give a damn about those consequences. All that mattered was the girl, and how good she would taste, and how good she smelled.

She turned her head and looked at me curiously, as if she'd sensed that she was being watched. In that eightieth of a second that our eyes held contact, I felt the weirdest sensation coarse through me. I could not quite put my finger on what it was, but the desire to kill her abated instantly when I met her eyes, and I felt a kind of burning shame. The red haze of the hunt cleared from my vision and I blinked rapidly.

In my haste to appear preoccupied, looking away from her, my fingers loosened to the point that the basket slipped from my grasp. Quick as a flash, I bent and snatched it out of the air before it crashed to the floor beneath my feet.

Great; I thought to myself bitterly. Just give yourself away, why don't you, you great big fool!

Unwanted thoughts began to resurface in my mind, running loose like wild dogs and bringing forth those images of a bloody scene which I had caused; thoughts I had previously dismissed. I closed my eyes and forced them to the back of my mind instantly, where they would not bother me for some time. I could hear the girl's heart, beating slightly faster now than it had been before our less-than-a-second of eye contact.

I looked up at her to see that her back was turned to me now. It was not fear that made her heart beat at this new pace. There was a subtle, but detectable difference between fear and the cause of this. The beating didn't sound so much frantic as it did … fluttery? Was it delight, perhaps, that had caused this reaction? Had she been impressed, awed, by my speed rather than repulsed and warded? Or was it embarrassment? Had she been shamed that I had caught her looking at me? I couldn't exactly tell. Lisa was much better at reading other women than I was; determining those subtle inflections.

The girl started to walk away from me, towards the back of the store. Obviously, she was done with why she had come, and was now ready to leave, because I pricked my ears for the sounds of her footsteps and determined that she was taking a roundabout way to the front register.

I breathed a sigh of release, considering how luck had shined on me in that moment. I didn't know how I would have handled it if she had breezed right by me smelling like that.

"Good afternoon, Miss," I heard Burt start. Predictable, I thought to myself. He always was one to start up a conversation with those he was serving.

"Afternoon," the girl replied. She had a sweet voice. Once again, I found the thoughts I considered dangerous and contrary to the life I had chose to live with just vanish in the back of my mind without a trace.

The girl sounded … intelligent. Wise even. And I thought that was odd, if I had guessed her age correctly. Her tone carried with it the air of someone who was much older, with just the faintest touch of self-consciousness at the outer edges, making her sound a little unsure of herself.

"I've not seen you around before," Burt continued. I heard the telltale bleeping of items being scanned across the barcode reader.

I've not smelled you around before; I added quietly to myself as I crept tentatively to the end of the aisle and pretended to examine the stock on the shelves in front of me. "New to Dysart?" Burt continued.

"Yeah," The girl replied breezily. "I flew up to Middlemount a couple of days ago and caught a bus in from there."

Well, that explains why your scent is a new one. I frowned. Yet again, Dysart had claimed another victim. It didn't explain how she'd acquired such a tormenting scent, though.

"Where do you hail from, then?"

"Newcastle, originally," the girl replied. "My father still lives down there with my younger sister. But my mother's lived up here for a few years now, so I came to live with her for a bit." She paused, and I found myself marvelling at just how … sociable she was. Who in their right mind revealed that much about themselves to a total stranger? "How much?" she asked.

"Twenty-five thirty, Miss," Burt replied formerly. I took another step and peered around the aisle before returning to the façade of pretending to examine items. "Thank you," he added after a minute.

There was another half a minute of silence, permeated by the other sounds inside the store, and the rattling of loose change in the till Burt was at. Deciding that I'd had enough of just standing around eavesdropping, I left the aisle entirely and started to walk oh-so-very slowly toward the line of registers, looking left and right as I passed each aisle as if assessing further needs.

"So," Burt started again during the silence. "You're a school-goer as well?"

"Final year," the girl replied as loose coins clinked against each other during the pass from Burt to her. "And then I think I'll go retreat to Miami or the Caribbean for the rest of my lift." She chuckled, giving away the joke. "You?"

"One more year after this one for me," Burt said solemnly. The sound of a shopping bag being lifted and passed over the counter filled the silence after that.

"Ah, don't fret," the strange girl said when she detected the remorse in his voice. "After you're done, you'll be free to annoy everyone else that is still in school." She laughed again, and I frowned at how that sound so easily affected me, placated me. "Well, I'll see you at school then, I suppose."

"Looking forward to it," Burt said, and grinned. "Have a nice day."

The girl didn't reply, but threw a quick glance over her shoulder at me as I approached the register lane. Seeing me, her cheeks flushed pink and she darted out of the store as fast as she could. I was at the counter seconds later, and coughed gently to alert Burt that I was there; he was a little preoccupied watching the beauty leave. He turned to me, startled.

"Ah, Mark!" He grinned at me. I settled for a half-smile as my wordless reply to his greeting. "Tell me, oh wise guru of the strange and whacky," he started, running my items over the scanner, "where do I get such _awesome_ eyes?"

"By selling your soul to the devil," I replied humourlessly. And then I watched in silence as Burt continued with his duties, waiting for the exchange to be over so that I could leave.


	7. Chapter 5

**5. I CAN'T ESCAPE THE TORTURE**

OK, so perhaps I had a slight problem. No; scrap that. I had a really, really _big_ problem. Just who the hell was that girl? Almost a week passed after that day in the store, and I had spent most of that time in my room, more than I usually do. I had to keep away from Jackson, Silanna and Lisa so that they wouldn't even catch a hint at the traitorous thoughts I'd had that day that had almost ruined everything for us. But in all of that time alone, I couldn't get that girl out of my head. Varied thoughts and scenarios ran rampant, refusing my attempts to squash them with my self control.

In some of these scenarios, the scent which that girl had possessed in such abundance had me sinking my venom-coated teeth deep into her exposed and delicate throat, puncturing her jugular with ease and helping myself to the sweet, succulent nectar coursing through her body. I'd abandoned in seconds that which had taken me years, _decades_ to grow accustomed to; gripping her tightly by the arms and ignoring her gasps of pain as I squeezed to discourage any thought of escape. I ignored the screams of horror from Burt and the others at the store as they stood around, transfixed in fear, watching me feed, finally realising just what I was.

In other thoughts, the look in her dark eyes in that fraction of a second when our eyes had met, when she's caught me staring, gazing upon her. The increase of her heart's thumping until it was going three times faster than normal—five times even. The rush of colour to her delicate cheeks that tinted her pale skin as she turned away from me at the counter and rushed out of the store.

And then, there were the imaginary scenarios, where one of us had approached the other, tentative, watchful, introducing ourselves. I did not know her name, so even that had its myriad variations.

It was incredibly foolish of me. Silly. Why the hell could I not get this girl out of my head? She was only a human; only a fragile, inferior, weak human. Yet, somehow, in those few seconds at the store, she had attained some measure of power over me. How else could I explain how my building bloodlust had abated at a single look from her, or just from hearing her unusually angelic voice?

This just would not do! And to complicate the matter even further, there was every chance that I would see her at school in only two days time. There was only one high school in Dysart, and that school had a population of around two hundred students. It would be the miracle of miracles if I somehow never saw her or got within ten meters of her at any time throughout the year. It would be the equivalent to the virgin mother, or parting the Red Sea!

I didn't quite know how to describe my thoughts about her in general. Not with one word. Attraction fit, I guess. She most certainly _was_ beautiful. But I had not obsessed over Simone this way when I had found myself attracted to her, nor had I obsessed over Sasha. I had not lusted over the scent of Simone's blood, or given any thought about obtaining just a taste of it. Was it because this stranger smelled so much more appetising than Simone ever had been? Was it the strength with which her blood called to me that was causing me to obsess so? Or was it something else entirely; some sort of undeniable _physical_ attraction that I felt for _her_?

I could have spoken to Lisa about these things and voiced my questions. But how typical it was that at a time I actually felt I wanted to talk to her about my feelings, she was otherwise absorbed. She might have been able to help me—might still be able to if she made it home in time before school.

I took her continued absence as a sign that she thought I would try to put off the trip to the plaza for as late as I possibly could in order to try and rope her into going instead. If she had come back the day I'd gone out, she would have seen all of her equipment sitting on her desk in perfect piles, waiting to be packed for school. I was only half tempted to go back down to the store anyway, for any old reason I could fabricate, just for the chance to run into this girl again. Perhaps I could get a name to go with the scent … and face.

But I shook the idea away as quickly as it came to me. Being in such proximity to the scent once had been bad enough and I had very nearly lost it. And while some people would claim that repetition is the essence of routine and control, I wasn't willing to bet her life on it.

But in place of that thought, another one surfaced; a memory I had almost succeeded in trying to forget …

* * *

_The blood was hot and thick as it splashed against the back of my throat. I sunk my teeth into my victim's throat as far as they would penetrate; heard and ignored his sharp intake of breath at the unexpectedness of the pain._

_ The man I had picked for my lunch today was a little larger than me, with muscles that threatened to tear through his top on their own. He was shaved bald with a strong jaw and a tomato-shaped nose. His eyes were more green than blue, and yet both at the same time._

_ His blood was pumping fast, hot; his heart beating a furious tempo beneath his ribs in time with it. It was adrenaline that caused the rush he felt; a result of the three second head start I'd allowed him to enjoy before I pounced on him and dragged him into the alleyway. I had been following him for a week, watching his every move to see if he would reoffend._

_ He was a murderer. My father, Timothy Winters, had defended him in court when he'd been charged with the malicious slaughter of three couples in their own suburban homes. They'd beaten the system, and he'd been let back out onto the streets. In my head, I could still hear the words my brother Brett had spoken to him when I had visited him and his partner last year. They rang like a tolling bell, over and over, as I continued to feed from the murderer._

"These people are scum! The lowest of the low. Why should they be permitted to live in freedom and luxury at the expense of all the lives they take away?"

_Why indeed?_

_ After a week of following him, a week in which every day I was increasingly overdue to feed and constantly fighting the struggle to pounce upon the nearest stranger to satiate myself, he had finally done what I'd expected of him. He'd cornered a young woman outside of a local store and had been about to shove her back inside when I'd stepped between them, snapped his wrist with an absent flick, and told the woman to leave … quickly._

_ I had then turned to the man and given him his three seconds to get going before I did something about it. Something in the set of my features must have scared even him, for he bolted right away. In a single leap, I was but a step behind him, and had my arm around his neck as I pulled him into the nearest alley—all too fast for any human to see._

_ I gripped the murderer's arms tightly as I drew blood from the main artery in his neck at a moderate pace. I was sure not to spill a single drop on my clothes. My feet were planted behind his kneecaps, which had forced him hard to his knees on the concrete. He tried to break free of my superhuman grip, but I tightened my hold on his arms, feeling the bones snap and splinter under such crushing force. He whimpered in pain and jerked his head to the side. My teeth slid out but a fraction of a centimetre before I compensated and dug them back in hard._

_ I could taste the barest traces of my own venom as it tried and failed to seep past my teeth and into the man's blood system._

_ No! I thought to myself darkly. I would _not_ allow it. This … scum, this piece of worthless slime, was not worthy of the gift of immortality. I would not let him become more dangerous._

_ The murderer's blood began to thin in that instant. I hadn't realised just how fast I was draining him, such was the bloodlust in my mind. Was I really that hungry? Well, I wouldn't be too hungry after this. Already, I was old enough in my immortal life that a single draining would sustain me for a few days, regardless of the burn in my throat._

_ Soon, there was nothing left in the murderer to take. I withdrew my teeth at once, cupped his jaw on both sides with my hands, and gave a quick, violent twist. The loud crack would have been heard nearly a block away, if there'd been any humans around. I released the body and watched it slump heavily to the concrete._

_ My breathing was heavy, wet, through my mouth. I felt the last drops of my victim's life slide down the back of my throat, easing the burn only fractionally, as I licked my teeth of any excess._

_ If I was honest with myself, I had to admit to a little disappointment over the whole event. I _had_ planned to draw out the feeding a little longer, not only to gain some satisfaction in the knowledge that I was causing him pain, but to increase the quantity of blood I drew from him. I'd been too quick, too hasty._

_ The sharp sound of a match being struck behind me caught my attention and I dodged out of the way to the left quickly as it soared by where I had been standing. The lit match bounced off the lifeless body in front of me and landed in a patch of alcohol-soaked concrete, bursting at once into a rapidly consuming fire that crept to the dead human._

_ I turned on the spot and saw someone standing behind me, blood tracking down the corner of her mouth to her chin and her eyes flashing bright crimson with recent satiation._

_ Her blonde hair fell in light curls around her face and was only shoulder length. She had a slim figure, but the manic look on her face detracted from the beauty she would otherwise have possessed._

_ "Watch it, woman!" I hissed angrily. "You could very well have set me off!"_

_ The woman laughed at me. "There was no risk of that. I knew that you'd move before it hit you. Stop your complaining. I did you a favour, as I see it." She began inspecting her nails casually._

_ "Favour? _What _favour?"_

_ "I've noticed that you have a nasty habit of leaving the body behind after you feed," the woman said. She peered over her white-painted nails to look me dead in the eye. Her expression was calm, the mania dropping a few places to be replaced by perplexity. "That results in unacceptable exposure. You taught me that. And you left a would-be witness. I had to sort that one out for you as well."_

_ It took me a few seconds to comprehend what it was that she meant by that. When it finally dawned on me, I looked around her to see the motionless and lifeless body of the woman I had told to run. I snarled at the blonde, looking back up into her eyes and baring my teeth at her in disgust. At once, her arrogant smile disappeared and she frowned, genuinely confused by my reaction._

_ "If I'd known that you were planning to take her for yourself, I would have let her go," she said defensively._

_ "I was _protecting_ her, you fool!" I snapped._

_ The blonde's frown deepened. "Protecting her?" she said incredulously. I nodded once. "Why on Earth would you protect … protect a … a piece of _meat_?"_

_ Within half the time it took her to blink, I was less than a meter away from her, face to face and growling deep in the back of my throat. I lashed out swiftly and struck her across the face with the back of my hand. While not powerful enough to send her flying through the wall, it did make her stagger a couple of steps backwards in surprise, and the small cracks that had formed in her cheek at the strike were resealing, solidifying. Her left hand reached up to touch the cheek tenderly, and her eyes burned as she glared at me._

_ "How _dare_ you!"_

_ "You still have not learned!" I spat. The blonde maniac narrowed her eyes in defiance, a look I was growing increasingly aggravated by over the years, and her lips drew back to reveal bloodstained teeth. "You said that you were willing to learn from my example; you told me that you wanted to learn from _me_. If that is still your wish, _you are not to attack the innocent!_"_

_ "If it's in our nature to be hunters, then why don't we act on that impulse?" the blonde challenged angrily._

_ "Because it is _wrong_," I said._

_ "Says who?" She took one step towards me, but came no closer than that. Just that much proximity to her was enough to cause me to close my hands into tight fists, preparing to hit her again if she gave me another reason to, to get my point across. "Who judges the innocent from the guilty? Who are you to pass judgement when you deny me that same freedom? You just passed judgement on that man"—she nodded over my shoulder to the burning corpse behind me—"because it _looked_ like he was going to hurt the woman. What makes you think that she wouldn't do a grievous wrong to someone else in the future?"_

_ And there was the crux of her argument. It always came down to her assumptions. I knew her beliefs inside and out. She believed that all humans were born to be guilty, and that they were freed from that guilt only when they were given the gift of immortality. To her, _vampires_ were the norm, _vampires_ were the favourites of God, and humans were the disgusting, do-no-right cousins that we were allowed to destroy because they offended Him._

_ I'd been trying to drill it into her head for years that she had to drop that belief if she was going to stick with me. Though I felt no kinship to her in the slightest, I felt … responsible for her. So I tolerated her, but only to a point._

_ "That's what I've been trying to get through that insanely thick skull of yours, woman!" I hissed dangerously with eyes narrowed. She balked at the insult, but said nothing. "_We_ make those judgements. We observe, and then we judge guilty those that are without a doubt about to ruin a life, not those who _might_ ruin a life!"_

_ "The difference being?"_

_ "The difference between a cold-blooded murderer, like him …" I couldn't bring myself to remind her of the person she'd been as a human. Her record wasn't exactly spotless either. That's how she'd ended up on my list. "… And a vigilante," I continued after a pause._

_ "Hello?" she said in a mocking, sing-song tone. "_Cold-blooded!_"_

_ "I didn't mean it in the literal sense," I growled._

_ "We're murdered by nature," the blonde argued dismissively. "And by choice; regardless of who we … regardless of who _you_ choose to feed upon."_

_ Before I could argue that point, she turned her back to me and strode out of the alley, flicking another lit match at the body of the woman she had murdered._

* * *

I pushed myself up from the edge of my bed with a start.

It had been an extraordinarily long time since I'd had any contact with that particular vampire. When we had parted ways, it was because I had finally decided that human blood was no longer something I wished to pursue as a source of nourishment. I had been drinking the blood of pigs, cows and horses for just over a year and had returned to Perth to try and persuade her that it was a satisfactory replacement, and that the hunting of animals wasn't as soul-crushing as the pursuit of human prey. Unfortunately, she hadn't taken to the idea so kindly, and I'd left her to her own devices, intent on having nothing further to do with her.

And when I thought about that memory after it faded, I realised why it had occurred at all after such a long time.

Clearly, it was this new girl in town, the demon of my thoughts. She had stirred me greatly, had brought the cold beast I had once been a little closer to the surface. My natural instincts were warring with my moral core, much in the same way that I had constantly conflicted with the manic blonde vampire. My natural instincts were telling me that I needed to rip, to tear, to kill, to feed off the luscious lifeblood of this strange and deliciously beautiful girl. They told me that she wouldn't be a terrible loss, a great tragedy. She was only one girl, and there were more than three billion others in the world to make up for the loss.

On the other hand, the opposing hand, my carefully nurtured more centre and my common sense were telling me how wrong such destructive thoughts were. She was a living, breathing, loving human being who hadn't even lived half of her life potential. She had done nothing wrong to merit an early death. She seemed to be quite friendly, and I could not deny that she was incredibly attractive, physically. She would definitely be a loss to someone; her parents, or her sister, or her friends. Logically, there wasn't a chance the entire town wouldn't be affected. Such a small community meant that even one death hit everyone on some level. She wouldn't just be one less girl in the world; she would be one less _life_ in the world.

Stop it, I chastised myself silently. Stop it right this very nanosecond. You've decided. You're stronger than this. If you weren't, you would have killed her last week at the plaza. You know you can do this. She will live. You'll see to that.

But try as I might, I couldn't entirely dispel the images of her broken and bloody corpse from my mind. It was a scene of death and tragedy that affected me more because, in those images, I was responsible for it. Even thinking about the Volturi's punishment if I exposed us, or the fact that my family and I would have to leave before suspicion was directed at us … even those thoughts didn't do the job I expected them to, that I _demanded_ they would do.

I needed a distraction, a big one. Even my own memories were betraying me, getting me to think about that girl, and I desperately needed to stop.

What I desperately wished for was sleep. I wasn't tired, never really would be, but if I could actually sleep, then I could finally escape all these unwanted thoughts. If I happened to dream about her at all, it was acceptable; I had never been able to recall any of my dreams when I'd been a human.

"Oh," I heard from downstairs, "this is interesting."


	8. Chapter 6

**6. WHAT I NEED IS A PEP TALK**

Obviously, it was Lisa who had spoken. There was no way to mistake her high trilling for the deep soprano of Jackson or the soft cascade of Silanna.

She was downstairs, and I gathered that she must finally have decided to return home at the time that I had been distracted by the memory of the manic blonde. I wondered if she'd been up to her room yet to see that her stuff was there. Or had she just decided to lounge around for a little while longer and look busy until I finally told her our things had been dealt with already?

She wasn't even speaking to me now. Not that she was ignoring me; just that she hadn't intended her comment for any but herself. But with my hearing the way it was, the sound still carried.

A second after I heard her, I was standing silently behind here. She was seated at the prop dining table we never used in the dining hall that was rarely visited. Open in front of her on the carved oaken table was today's newspaper, opened to page 3. Half of the page was filled with a large colour picture of a middle-aged man dead on a street I didn't recognise. He was covered in blood, his shirt ripped open at the front. A big, black dog—most likely a Labrador—was superimposed rather poorly over the picture in a way that made it look as if it was sniffing around the dead man's throat.

My left eyebrow arched in curiosity. The picture was beneath the article's title, which was in big, bolded Monotype Corsiva font:

**WILD DOG ATTACK CLAIMS THIRD VICTIM**

Below the picture was the article itself. Standing perfectly still so as not to disturb Lisa's own apparent interest in the article, I began to read:

Police yesterday discovered the body of 43 year old businessman, Daniel Wallace, three blocks from his house in Rockhampton's central city district. This marks the third such murder in the past week alone, all in the same general area of the city.

Similar cases have been documented in Sydney, Perth, Kingaroy, and Alice Springs over the past twenty years. The general consensus of the Queensland Police Department is that the latest cases are not related to the others, and sources claim that police believe the latest incidences to be no more than rabid attacks from animals.

Police are unable to make any connection between the three victims. All three are from different cultural and ethnic backgrounds, ranging from Asian to Aboriginal to Caucasian. The victims have been identified as two male and one female, aged 19, 43, and 27 respectively. One of the previous victims was long-term unemployed, while the other had been holding a steady low-end job for a number of years. While the latest victim was not married and did not have children, the last victim, Alicia Erickson was married with three children, and the first victim, Robert Eddleston, was divorced with one.

The victims were all estimated to have died in the later hours of the night, and there are no witnesses. Though no details of the reports have been provided by the Police Department, sources claim that each victim's throat was mutilated in such a way that the theory of animal attacks is most likely.

"Got to hand it to the humans," I started, smiling a little at the article's creativity as I finished reading it. "They sure know how to rationalise that which they either do not know or do not _want_ to know."

"You think this is a vamp attack too?" Lisa asked without looking at me.

"It fits the MO," I said with a shrug. "No way to connect the victims, no way to lead back to the killer. All of them died at night time and their throats were mangled. The reporter even speculated that it could be connected to previous murders dating back twenty years. Despite the cops' denial, that's a pretty strong point right there."

"So definitely not a newborn," she replied, frowning. "But the pattern doesn't match. We're usually more careful than this. The Volturi wouldn't stand for it."

"They won't do anything. The attacks are being portrayed as animal attacks," I pointed out. "This vampire, or vampire_s_ if there's more than one, are taking what they need and then making sure that there's no way the attacks can be seen for what they truly are."

"We can see it."

"Because of what we are," I reminded her. "And the Volturi will see that too, but they'll see that the appropriate precautions are being reviewed. To me, this smacks of trying to grab attention."

"Attention?"

"Yes. From some of us—others of our kind, that is," I added quickly. "Maybe trying to suss out any competition to see if they can claim the district for their own hunting grounds, or else seeing if any of us nearby will recognise that one of us is behind these attacks and decides to introduce ourselves."

"That could very well be it," Lisa said thoughtfully. She considered for a second, and then turned in her seat to look up at me. "You've been around longer than I have …" she started slowly. "And you were on your own for a while before you met Jackson and Silanna. At a guess, how many of us do you think there are in Australia?"

"About fifty," I said flippantly. "Us, Milo, a couple I know up north that move around a lot. We're pretty stable here, and Milo likes to call Melbourne his home, which is unusual for typical vampire."

"He doesn't roam?"

"Nope. I guess he's careful enough never to leave anything behind that can trace back to him." I shrugged, and Lisa shivered.

She was the lucky one of the family.

Jackson hadn't really been cruel like most _Others_, but he'd still fed from humans when he'd been thirsty, and he'd done that for nearly six hundred years. He and Silanna had been together for just over two hundred of those, after he'd turned her, and they'd continued along that lifestyle, regardless of how much they detested it. It wasn't until they'd met up with me in the nineteen-twenties that they'd considered an alternative. By then, I'd given up my murderous nature and was pursuing an unconventional diet of farm- and wild animals. It had taken them years to get used to, and they'd each slipped up once or twice apiece.

Lisa, on the other hand, has never been tainted by that corruption. I know she's felt the burn. I know she's been within nanoseconds of ruining her record and jumping a human to feed. But she never has. Human blood has never touched her lips, not even by accident. In fact, her control was to the point that—years ago, in another school, another time—I had almost slipped when a schoolmate had grazed his knee on the track field. She'd been the only one to notice the ravenous look that had crossed my face, the only one to see my teeth gleaming in not-quite-sunlight as I inched closer. Demonstrating the greatest restraint I'd ever seen in her, she knocked me to the ground at once and dragged me out of the school before I could ruin us.

I'd promptly thanked her for that.

"I haven't met every vampire in the country," I clarified. "But Milo's been around longer than I have, and he's met pretty much all of them that I haven't. I do know that the ones I've met, and most of the ones Milo's met, would never be interested in creating more of us though; they detest the idea of being responsible for newborns. So the chances are that if our numbers have gone up above that … it's by maybe one or two."

Lisa waved a hand at me impatiently as I prattled on. "I haven't made my point yet. Out of those fifty, how many would you say are in Queensland?"

"At the moment: seven—us, Milo, and the couple up north I mentioned."

"And we're the closest to Rockhampton," Lisa pointed out. I nodded, finally seeing where she was going with that. "Nomads coming from, say, New South Wales or Victoria would likely pass through Rockhampton on their way up or down the coast. It's not that much of a stretch to assume they're making a point to us."

I considered that, and nodded when I realised that her point was rather valid. Without a verbal response for her, I walked around the table and stood in front of the plate glass door leading out to the open yard behind the house.

"How long have you been upstairs brooding?" she asked, changing the topic.

I don't brood, and I frowned at the implication. "When did you get back home?" I asked her instead.

"Just before you came downstairs, actually," she replied airily. That I'd ignored her question didn't seem to bother her much. "I grabbed a paper from the store on my way back and thought I'd catch up on the latest news before I did anything else." Pause, then; "Thanks for the books and whatnot, by the way," she added sincerely.

When I didn't answer, she jumped on it immediately. It's the way she is. She can just pick up on my mood like _that_. "What's eating you this time?" she demanded. "Still not Simone Karson, is it?" I narrow my eyes defiantly and she saw it reflected in the spotlessly clean glass of the door that I faced. "I'll assume not, then."

I heard the telltale rustle of paper as she closed the newspaper, folded it over, and dumped it on the table.

"Lisa …" I growled. She waited through my hesitation.

I'd been thinking about this for a week now. What I was about to discuss with Lisa was exactly that—a discussion. She was the only one I knew who would put up an argument for my own sake. Jackson and Silanna were more likely to just nod and let me change my mind—if ever—on my own.

It struck me that, with how well Lisa knew my moods and the way we got along, we had never become mates the way Silanna and Jackson had hoped. In most ways, we responded to each other and treated each other very much the same way that mated vampires did. We knew each other extremely well; knew when to avoid each other's moods and tempers and when it was best to stick around and console each other.

But it wasn't to be. We just didn't see each other that way. Some people would have said "Give it time", but we've been together for fifty years now, and there's been no change.

So with her being the only person I could discuss my preoccupation with, I thought that perhaps it was time to let her know what I was thinking. "I've decided that I'm not going to finish school this time around."

She surely didn't disappoint my expectations. As I'd thought, she was by my side in an instant, glaring at the side of my face with such intensity she could have been firing laser beams. "What, dear brother, may I ask brought on this bout of idiocy? Hmm?" she demanded quietly.

I didn't answer her right away. This was partly to give me a brief moment to formulate some semblance of a response. I figured that it was one thing to tell her I was thinking of dropping out of school, but it was something altogether different to tell her about that girl from the IGA. I was so ashamed by my non-actions, by my horrid thoughts that day. How could I heap that shame on her?

"I just … don't see the appeal in it anymore," I lied easily. Given that I knew that girl was going to be there this year, there most definitely was _plenty_ of appeal in finishing. "I mean, we've gone through school after school how many times since Silanna felt comfortable letting you in amongst the public? We know quite a lot, and far more than the rest of the people that we're supposed to be on the same level with.

"I think that … maybe … I might just give finishing a miss this time around." I paused again and drew my face into what I hoped looked like thoughtfulness. "I might travel for a bit. Catch up with Milo and go and see some of those places he said he was thinking of going. I might even go and see the Cullens and kick some sense into their prize pet."

"Don't lie to me!" Lisa shrieked. I cringed away from her tone and turned to look at her. Her eyes were wide with shock, suspicion. Her expression was livid.

"I'm not. I really—"

"I said"—She hit me in the shoulder—"don't!"

"You hit me," I said softly. I frowned a little in genuine indignation and took a step back in case she decided that it was best if she followed through with another punch. She took a step forward to keep the distance between us the same.

"Sit!" she commanded, pointing to the nearest chair at the oaken table. I sat down, grudgingly, and waited as she took her old seat opposite me. Her glare was still in place, with no signs of letting up any time soon.

I stared back at her, waiting for her to start. She didn't … at least, not right away. She merely continued to sit there across from me and glare dangerously. I didn't want to break the silence in case of another sudden attack, so I kept my mouth shut.

"Explain," she said coldly. "And I want the truth."

OK, so she'd seen through the lie. I'd give her credit for being a lot more observant than I'd expected. Maybe she wasn't so stupid. But I still didn't feel like divulging the incident from the IGA to her, not yet. I couldn't let her shoulder my shame until I'd gotten past it—if that could ever happen.

So I compromised. "It's complicated," I said.

"Complicated?" Lisa shouted incredulously. Anyone out in the yard—front or back—most definitely would have heard her, human or not. "Mark; _everything_ with you is 'complicated.'"

I shrugged. "Not good enough," she persisted, her lips now drawn into a line. "Why don't you want to finish school?"

"I t old you; it's complicated," I said sternly. I didn't look up from the table. I didn't want to meet her hard gaze for fear that the malice in her amber eyes would make me spill everything. "I would rather not discuss my reasoning just now, OK?"

"Will you ever?" Lisa asked, softer now. I risked a peek and saw that she was no longer holding me with a glare, but gazing at me with a curious, worried look in her eyes.

But she made a good point. _Would _I ever talk to her about what had happened—or rather, _almost_ happened—last week at the IGA? I'd already vowed to myself that I would only talk about it once I'd shoved the burning shame and self recriminations so far from my mind that they would never return. But in asking me if I would talk about it with her, Lisa was unwittingly asking me if I would ever get over that shame, if I would ever stop considering myself weak and untrustworthy for the dangerous thoughts I'd had that day.

I knew that if I told her about it now, she would be obviously torn between happiness and concern. On the one hand, I knew that she might possibly understand the torture I'd been under because of the Miss Newcastle's scent. She'd probably even congratulate me on the restraint that I'd exercised, and the fact that I'd been able to get a grip on myself and stop from doing anything stupid.

But the fact remained that I'd had those dangerous thoughts in the first place; that I'd come so very close to acting on those thoughts and tasting human blood for the first time in more than eighty years. It sickened _me_, and that part of me that stopped me from telling Lisa about that now was the exact same part that expected her to be both disgusted and angry. She liked it here. If I'd slipped that day …

"Not today," I said. "But one day, when I'm comfortable discussing it, then yes, I think I will come to you."

"Good," Lisa said smugly. Really, I knew that that was pretty much all she needed. "Now, on the other score: you are _absolutely not _going to quit school. I don't care what you say. I'll drag you there each and every day myself for the entire school year if I have to. How do you think that's going to rate on your self-esteem? Do you think the girls will still be all over you then, after they see your sister—half your size—_dragging_ you around behind her? I think not."

She paused and sighed. "Look," she continued, "you're in your final year. You've got all of your things already, and the yearly educational fees have already been paid for us both. If you pull out now, think of all that money you've just wasted for nothing. Money doesn't exactly grow on trees, you know."

I smiled, finally looking up into her eyes for any length of time now. She was grinning back at me, clearly recognizing her victory. "No, it doesn't," I said smartly. "But you know full well that a couple of hundred dollars isn't going to be missed."

Lisa chuckled and pushed herself up from the table.

"Where are you going?" I asked.

"Well, now that my missing here has been accomplished, I'm going to go and have a bath." I raised an accusatory eyebrow at her. "What?" she demanded. "Just because I don't sweat, and therefore don't stink, doesn't mean I can't just take a bath to relax!"

"Fine," I said dismissively. "But when you're done, don't forget to take the cars down to the servo. They both need their tanks topped off, and since _I went out of my way_ to get your school things, that's the least you can do."

"You read my mind." And then she was gone.


	9. Chapter 7

**7. THE FIRST DAY OF SCHOOL**

So, after two long days of tortuous, dangerous, and enticingly curious thoughts about Miss Newcastle, the day had finally come: school.

Over those two days, I tried to immerse myself in any activity I could find that would distract myself from the upcoming prospect of returning to school and facing the tantalising scent from the strange brunette. I played Lisa and Jackson in several games of chess and checkers, delighting in beating Lisa hands-down every time and getting frustrated by how skilfully Jackson played. He made me work hard for the one win I had out of seventeen games. I had much to learn from him, obviously. Then I joined Silanna on her daily runs around Dysart, starting from the dirt road leading to our place and running a few laps around the edge of the town as we discussed our short stay in Sydney a couple of decades ago and our comparatively lengthy stay in Brisbane before that, after Lisa had joined the family.

Needless to say, Silanna did most of the talking. I was more than happy to listen for the most part, adding comments and replying only occasionally. She enjoyed our stays in the bigger cities far more than I did. I was more of a suburban or small-town person; preferring the places that were quiet and still over constantly noisy and mobile. I also helped Jackson and Silanna weed the gardens in both the front and back yard spaces, and watched them as they snipped off dead growths from some of the more exotic stems and shoots; all the while we chatted away about anything that came to mind.

They were careful—unlike Lisa—to avoid topics that they knew did not interest me; such as our stay in Warwick, my failed relationship with Simone Karson, and my current state of preoccupation that even they had sensed and become curious about.

And then, to wrap up my final school-free day, Lisa and I got together in front of the house and washed and waxed her Ferrari 458 Italia, my Nissan Skyline GT-R Spec V, and the 2010 Ford Ranger that Jackson and Silanna shared. That task had ended up in a water fight, with both me and Lisa wresting the hose from each other's grip until we were both dripping wet. A midnight run to the bottom of Campbell Peak and back was all it took to dry ourselves off. We showered when we got back home, donned new clothes, and then spent our last hours alone, doing our own things.

I can't speak to what Lisa might have been doing to pass the time, but I left home right away and went to the closest feeding ground and gorged myself on dingos until I felt full and the burn died away. Under normal circumstances, I wouldn't have had to feed for another week, give or take a few days. But considering my new torment, I figured I would take every precaution necessary to ensure I would survive. After I was finished, I went straight back home, ducked up the stairs to my room, locked the door behind me, and picked up my year-old electric guitar: a red 1965 JB Hutto Montgomery Airline.

I'd only shown an interest in learning to play twenty or so years ago, before we'd landed ourselves in Sydney. I'd been improving over the years since then, and while I cannot safely say that I rank with the best musicians in the world, I'm definitely no novice. I had been having trouble with one song in particular for a couple of years, though, and I was determined to have it perfect by the time I graduated high school this year. Only, there had been a few distractions the past couple of years, and I hadn't had as much time to practice as I would have liked. If those distractions had bothered me some other time instead, I could have moved on to the next challenge by now.

By the time the sun had come up over the cloud layer, I'd made a little headway, but not enough that I was frustrated with myself and nearly snapped one of the steel strings in that frustration.

Half an hour before school was to start, Lisa and I were in our respective bathrooms fixing our hair, checking our teeth, rinsing out our mouths. I examined my teeth in the mirror at least a dozen times to be sure that there was no visible hint of the impromptu hunting trip I'd returned from several hours ago. We didn't bother with uniforms. Dysart Secondary had become lax in enforcing the uniform policy in the past few years, and we were hardly model students, we didn't try to appear it.

We kissed Silanna on the cheek, said our goodbyes to both her and Jackson—who was out in the back yard, pruning again—and then jumped into our cars and sped off. We raced each other to school, as we sometimes did, recklessly ignoring the speed limits of the town and dodging around slower-moving traffic and each other. She beat me through the gates to the parking lot, of course, but as she was too preoccupied with self congratulations, I was quicker to find an empty slow to park and slipped my car swiftly into the space. I switched the car off and picked up my backpack from the passenger's seat. After I was out and had the door locked, I watched Lisa scowling at me as she drove by, and I grinned back cheekily.

Without waiting for Lisa to find a parking spot, I walked away from the parking lot in the general direction of the administration building. There weren't many people around, and certainly none looking my way, so I moved fast, and was soon at the building's entrance. It was expected of all students to stop by when they arrived on the first day of the year to pick up their timetables, and a map of the campus if they were new. I mused on the fact that it was if they expected some of the older students would have forgotten their schedules over the six-week summer break.

When I pushed the door open, I saw that a line had already begun to form in front of the reception desk. There were a few new faces there, but also some that I already knew. I said not a word as I headed to the back of the queue.

Unfortunately, I didn't make it that far before I was called out. The receptionist—an overly exuberant, super thin lady called Ellis—spotted me and called me straight to the desk. I acquiesced, reluctantly, and it didn't go entirely without complaint. I ignored the stares and muttered remarks of the others as I passed them and slung my backpack over my right shoulder.

"Your schedule, Mr. Winters," Ellis said in her unusually high-pitched trill of a voice. "And Ms. Davidson's as well. Could you let her know that the headmaster would like a word with her during first break today?"

I nodded without a word, flashed her a polite smile—and ignored the flush of colour it brought to her face—before accepting the two slips of paper she handed me. Then I turned and left through the same door I'd come in from and trudged back to the parking lot. Lisa joined me halfway there and we changed direction simultaneously to head into the campus proper, side by side.

I handed over her schedule, which elicited a surprised look in return. "And they say that chivalry is dead," she joked. She peered at the paper intently, as if she half expected to find a mistake. She didn't.

"Not back in my day. I never grew out of the habit," I pointed out. We turned right when we entered the main building and stepped through the door. "Ellis says that God wanted to have a word with you—first break."

"God" was a joke, of course. Some of the long-term students had come to call the headmaster of Dysart Secondary that scathingly because that's the way she purported herself. There were surveillance cameras in all the classrooms and corridors, and when he busted someone breaking one of the more serious rules, he made it out that he hadn't needed the cameras to know what they'd done.

His actual name was Neville Simmons. He was a large, overbearing, middle-aged man with square-cut, fuzzy, greying hair and a slight lisp. It was, apparently, his mission to wage war on the students on the campus, and he never missed an opportunity to do so. Lisa and I were his favoured victims, when he could come up with something to pin on us. We were, as he so eloquently put it, "anti-social misfits."

So far, apparently, in the history of Simmons's entire reign as headmaster, only one student had ever had the gall to call him "Neville" and "God" in the same sentence to his face: Lisa. It had happened last year, at the end of the year. She'd used both names in the same long-winded sentence on the last day when Headmaster Simmons had called her in to his office regarding her nose piercing.

Now; I'd thought at the time that that had been a rather silly move for him. Lisa had had the piercing since she'd been human, fifty years this year, and she was only _now_ being pulled up for it? Never had such a thing happened before. Her vampire-given beauty was usually enough to deter acrimony from male teachers, and mine was usually enough to deal with the women. I had no idea why Simmons appeared immune to that. Most people believed that the only reason he had rounded on Lisa for the piercing was because he'd run out of excuses to call her out on.

So it went without saying that I couldn't blame Lisa for the way she'd reacted. It wasn't exactly like she could remove the piercing. The hole would have sealed up in seconds, and there was no needle in the world that would be able to reopen it for her. However, undoubtedly because of the argument that Lisa had had with our "illustrious headmaster", his wrath was going to be constant this year in retaliation.

"What does he want this time?" Lisa demanded, her eyebrows creasing in the middle to express her distaste for the man.

We were walking slowly down the long covered path that bisected most of the school. We had different classes this morning; I had Math, and Lisa had English. This conversation wouldn't last.

When she saw the look I was giving her, her eyebrows shot up in surprise. "Not for that harmless little back-and-forth last year, surely?"

I nodded, and Lisa sighed, defeated. "Are you going to go see him, or are you intending to make him come hunting for you. That might give him a heart-attack you know? I mean, if he dies, at least we've got lunch on hand." I smiled slyly, but the comment didn't go unpunished.

She thumped me hard on the shoulder and I laughed. "I was kidding." I said with a chuckle.

"Even if I was partial to humans, he is _so_ not my idea of lunch. Have you ever actually taken in his scent? Talk about _EW_! Now, Fiona, on the other hand …" She winked at me, and this time it was me that thumped her hard. "Something I said?" she said innocently.

"I wouldn't bite Fi if she was the last source of food left on the face of the planet."

"Not even to survive? Wow! That's a really strong—" I hit her again to shut her up before she finished her insinuation. "Ow! What was that for? What did I say that time?" she whined.

"Fiona is a friend," I clarified in a way that left no debate on the subject, "nothing … more … than …" I trailed off. _Shit!_ I thought to myself desperately. Please, no! Not now! Not already!

I looked around wildly as we passed another turn off. The scent was fresh, only a couple of minutes past, and it was just as strong as the first time I had caught I t. It had come from the turn we'd passed and was continuing along the path that Lisa and I were still following.

"Oh, my," Lisa gasped, startled. A brief look across at her confirmed that, while obviously not as affected as I was, she was still struggling. She was swallowing more frequently, trying to douse the flames at the back of her throat, and her eyes were narrowed like she was on a hunt. "What _is_ that? That smells so …" She shook her head vigorously to clear it.

Without looking at her, I said a quick "See you at lunch" and took off down the next turn in the direction of the Math classrooms. Unfortunately for me, the scent also led me this way. If Lisa was smart, she'd know that too, and she'd be standing at that concrete intersection watching me until she was sure I wouldn't do anything foolish. I prayed silently that I wasn't in the same class group as Miss Newcastle so early in the day.

First bell wasn't due to go off for another five minutes, but already I could see chattering students filing into the two rooms ahead of me. I entered the room on the right, where my Math class had been last year, and was pleased to see that it was still our room this year; a lot of familiar faces were scattered about in social groupings, chatting quietly amongst themselves. Scanning all the faces quickly, I let out a quiet sigh of relief that the strange brunette was not there. A couple of people looked up at me as I made my way across the room and picked a seat as far to the back of the class as possible. I sat down, dumped my backpack on the carpeted floor next to me.

I picked out an exercise book from the bag, a couple of pencils, a red biro and a blue one, and then laid them all our haphazardly on the desk. I didn't want to look _too_ organised for a supposed teenager. I labelled the book with the blue pen, and then sat in silence with my eyes closed tightly while I fought the hungry fire at the back of my throat.

How typical of my luck. Barely five minutes into the new school year and, already, Miss Newcastle's delectable scent was plaguing me.

What the hell was wrong with me? Had I done something so monstrous and unforgiveable that someone had thought of the perfect torture? It wasn't fair! I could think of nothing I had done to deserve such cruelty, and I knew that none of my own kind would have had the necessary restraint to unleash this brand of personal hell upon me. Even Lisa had noted on how delicious the girl's scent was, and if _she_ could note it, any one of us could.

I was distracted from my recriminations by a honeysuckle and spice scent on the approach. It wasn't an overly repellent smell; in fact, it was kind of sweet. But it was nothing when compared to the scent that Miss Newcastle exuded. I knew this new smell too well, too, to be surprised by it.

"Good morning, Fiona," I said without opening my eyes.

"What's so good about it?" a sweet, feminine voice replied bitterly. I grinned, my eyes still clamped shut from fighting off the urges the other girl's scent had brought about in me.

Fiona was excellent company, and she was about the only human in the school that had actively sought out a friendship with Lisa and me. Lisa had a few friends, but it was obvious that, despite her best efforts, they weren't as comfortable around her as Fiona was. It was instinctual for humans to fear us, even if they couldn't exactly explain why they did.

Fiona often joked about our unusual appearances and auras, but she was a great distraction from the high school drama everyone else constantly got themselves involved with. She took my mind off things that I didn't really want to think about. Though it was obvious that my appearance had the typical effect on her that it did on the rest of the school's female population, she was perhaps the only one to fight against that, to look past it.

It was no wonder that Lisa had occasionally suspected something intimate between Fiona and I. But she was nothing more than a friend to me; someone that I could talk to easily about anything … well, almost anything. She was about the only human I had allowed myself to open up to—within reason—in this hole of a school.

Fiona's sweetener scent was strong enough now to indicate that she had picked the empty seat in front of mine. I opened my eyes to verify it.

"You still haven't told me exactly how you're able to do that," she said resentfully. In actuality, I _had_ told her, last year. She was well aware that I had sensitive olfactory senses. I'd allowed her to test that by bringing in a random lunch every day for three months to see if I could guess. My track record through that was perfect, and she'd finally believed me. But she still didn't believe that I could identify someone based on their sense of smell, and so she thought that my stating as much was akin to a joke.

"Yes I have," I reminded her.

She sighed in defeat. "It's the first day of school, Mark. I really am _not_ in the mood for games today, OK?"

I miaowed mockingly. "Sounds like someone got up on the wrong side of the bed this morning," I said with a chuckle.

Fiona looked like she was about to respond to that, but our teacher chose that moment to make himself known. I didn't recognise him—by sight or smell. Sure, there had been idle rumour around town all summer about staffing changes in both the Primary and Secondary schools this year, but no one I'd heard—or rather, overheard—talking about it had mentioned anything about my last Math teacher, Helen Patterson, leaving. I could tell from the shocked expression on some of the other students' faces that no one else had expected it either.

Math turned out to be a boring affair, really. Though, considering the subject, perhaps that wasn't entirely out of the realm of possibility anyway. The new teacher wanted to get to know everyone, so we had all taken it in turns standing up in our place, stating our names and a little bit about ourselves. All I had been willing to volunteer was my name, how long I'd been in Dysart, and that I liked to annoy my sister, Lisa. He seemed amused enough by that not to press me for more.

The new teacher was Paul Bastion, and he was likeable enough even if the subject he taught was not. His scent bordered on the line between pleasant and unpleasant, with the telltale bite of a whiskey drinker. I had a little respect for him on that score. He told us that he preferred to take a not-so-strict approach to teaching. It was a welcome change from Helen Patterson's approach. He preferred his classes to _enjoy_ the process as they learned.

Since I had done Math enough times to safely say I had committed every possible scrap of the subject to memory, I honestly couldn't say that there was ever a chance I would enjoy the subject; no matter how fun the new teacher would try to make it. But he was enthusiastic enough to automatically be a new favourite for the year.

Mercifully, the class ended and I dashed off to Legal Studies in another hall. Fiona had Biology with Lisa on the same line, so I had neither of them for company in this class and as such I usually sat right at the back of the room at a table on my own, taking notes and talking to no one.

I was gratified to see that Yasmine Simpson was still teaching the subject. She was a little stricter than the overenthusiastic Mr. Bastion, but she had interesting stories to tell that made up for that, when it was relevant. Whenever it was relevant to the law that we were studying, or the topic that we were discussing at the time, she would occasionally share a story of something that she had experienced or seen or heard happen.

As a vampire, our memory was inherently perfect. But even if I had been human, with a more fallible capacity for storing memory, I still would never have forgotten that she had once nearly fallen into a volcano while hiking with her husband in Fiji years ago. Some of the others in the class had decided to actively never let her live it down, bringing it up every time the opportunity presented.

Simpson was no more tolerant of a fun class than the school's headmaster was with Lisa, however. She told her stories merely for educational benefit, with no intent to bring to class to fits of laughter, as was usually the case.

Then it was first break.

From previous years, Lisa and I had worked out a routine of meeting in the locker rooms and then heading to the lunch hall together from there. Today would be different, however. She would be heading to the administration block to start World War III with the headmaster over their argument last year. The Science classes were closer to the lunch hall than the Legal class was, and because Fiona, like Lisa and I, did not have a locker, she would head straight there from class and wait for us.

When I got to the hall and walked in through the door-less archway, I found Fiona sitting at our usual table on her own, prodding away at her homemade salad with a plastic fork.

Instantly, a wave of sympathy washed over me, much as it always did when I saw this. People rarely approached Fiona at lunch because she sat with me and Lisa. It never bothered either of us that others were afraid to come near us. It was instinctual. But it bothered me that Fiona's other friends steered well away from her when she was around us.

I walked over to the table and plonked myself down on the seat opposite her. She looked up. "How was Legal? Anything juicy to report?" She speared a cherry tomato on the end of her fork and popped it swiftly into her mouth.

I reached down into my backpack, unzipped the cooler, and took out the shiny green apple in there. I closed the cooler and the backpack and tossed the apple once into the air, caught it, then tore a large chunk off with my teeth. It wasn't in the least bit satisfying—in fact, the taste and texture were _completely_ disagreeable to a body that was wholly sustained on a liquid protein diet. In fact, I would have compared my eating the apple to a human eating dirt. To top that off, I wasn't particularly even hungry after the hunt I'd been on earlier in the morning. But I've learned that appearances are everything in high schools, and it would have looked suspicious if Lisa and I were never seen to be eating.

"Not really," I said after I'd swallowed the chunk of apple whole. Fiona, who had been looking back down at her healthy-looking salad, missed it. "Yasmine was overly formal today, as usual. She just took us over all the subjects we covered last year and some of the ones we'll be doing this year. Boring stuff, really. I actually think I fell asleep at one point. I hope I didn't snore."

Fiona stifled a laugh. "No Lisa?"

"God wanted to have a word with her," I explained. "I would have thought she'd mentioned it in Biology." Fiona shrugged at the comment and I bit into the apple again.

"You know …" I started, my mouth full. Fiona looked back up. "I'm not stopping you from going and sitting with your other friends, if you'd like to."

Fiona frowned disapprovingly at me as I slowly chewed my apple chunk. "For starters; it's rude to talk with your mouth full, Winters. Didn't those parents of yours teach you any manners?" Oops. She only addressed me by my surname when she was particularly annoyed with me. I shrugged again and swallowed. "Additionally; if they want to sit and chat with me, they're welcome to come over to this table and stop being so unbearably bigoted."

I raised an eyebrow questioningly. We had this same argument any time that I was stupid enough to bring it up.

"Dad hates it," she went on, "how some people can just be shunted aside in social settings just because they're so different from everyone else. I mean … take you and Lisa, for example."

"What about us?" I said, perhaps a little too quickly. "How are we so different?" Stupid question, I realised, when Fiona shot me a "come on!" look.

"Well …" she started. She paused to munch on some leafy greens I would have loved to chew on if I'd still been human. "You're both so … pale. And your eyes are just as much of a mystery as the rest of you. I don't think I've ever met anyone as secretive and mysterious as either of you. Dad says that it's unacceptable that just because of those differences, people aren't so willing to reach out and make an attempt."

I resisted the urge to tell her the truth at that moment. "You did," I told her instead.

"And I'll forever be my daddy's little angel for being a cut above the rest of the crowd." I took another chunk out of my apple and was quick to destroy it before I swallowed.

"For being weird, you mean," I corrected again.

"If the desire to know you and your sister, despite your obvious differences, is weird; then I'm not the only one that should be included in the category," Fiona replied with a sly grin. I choked on my next, smaller, chunk of the apple. When I recovered, my eyes were wide, searching. The expression on Fiona's face was unreadable.

"E–excuse me?" I stammered.

Fiona tilted her head so slightly and inconspicuously to my left that I would have mistaken her for a vampire if not for the colouring and the scent. I turned my head to look in the direction that she had indicated, and saw exactly what she was trying to point out.

_Her_; the girl from the IGA. Miss Newcastle. Her hair was loose around her shoulders today, like the last time I had seen her, and her eyes were still perfectly uniform. She was looking straight at me, there was no mistaking it. When she noticed my gaze on her, she looked quickly down at the table, a red flush colouring her pale cheeks in an instant. I could hear her heart repeating the same fast-paced tempo in her chest that I had heard last week.

This time, though, she had been caught staring at me. If I hadn't seen it for myself, I likely wouldn't have believed that Fiona wasn't just playing some cruel prank.

"Mark!" Fiona hissed. I averted my eyes from the strange girl and turned to look across the table to see a fresh smile playing across Fiona's lips. "Why don't you just go over there and say hello, rather than stare at her like you have been doing for the past three minutes?"

Three minutes? I checked my watch. Sure enough, it had been exactly that long. Wow!

I shook my head automatically. Being that close to the scent could be dangerous. I wouldn't risk turning into an animal with so many witnesses around to point the finger at me if something happened to her. Once I was in that state, no one here would be safe, anyway. Not even Fiona.

"I need to go for a walk. Come with?"

Fiona hesitated for a moment as I pushed myself up abruptly from the table. This drew a few curious gazes from around the lunch hall—including _hers_.

"OK."


	10. Chapter 8

**8. THE EVIL NEW GIRL**

During mine and Fiona's walk around the school grounds to occupy us for the rest of the lunch break, we ran into Lisa. She joined us for the remainder of the half hour, and we traded holiday stories … at first. Luckily for me, however, when Fiona finally brought up the topic of Miss Newcastle, to fill Lisa in, the end-of-break bell rang and the girls departed for their Drama lesson while I headed for the music room a couple of buildings away.

Speak of the devil. The new girl was there when I arrived; standing outside the room with the rest of the class, talking quietly with Annabel Redman. Damn! I paid her no mind, and stood far enough away that her scent wasn't _too_ overwhelming. It was still a battle of wills, however, not to jump her there and then and suck her dry.

The teacher arrived soon and let us into the room. As per usual, I picked another solitary spot, but was a little irritated to see that the desks had been rearranged since last year. My usual spot at the back of the room was now a solitary spot to the side, near the window. I sat down, pulled out my pens, pencils, and yet another unused book. Then I labelled the book and closed my eyes to wait.

Music was pretty much the same as Legal Studies had been before break; Ms. Richardson spent it going over what we had learned last year, and what she expected of us over the first semester of this one. Apparently, the end-of-semester assignment that she was planning to set for us was a performance. Each of us was going to be expected to pick a song to perform in front of the class … and a video camera.

Brilliant, I thought sarcastically; absolutely brilliant. A deadline to get that song I was working on worked out. That was all I needed. I toyed with the possibility of trying to weasel my way out of it come the actual deadline. I didn't particularly like the idea of performing in front of a camera if I could prevent it. That could be used as hard evidence of who I was seen to be here, so that years down the track if I ever ran into any of them, my cover could be blown.

Then, although by this point I'd lost interest in paying much attention, the class's new additions were asked to introduce themselves to the rest of us. If I had been paying attention, I would finally have had a name to go with the new girl's face. But I was too absorbed in the senseless patterns that I was scribbling all over the inside cover of the exercise book.

Usually, multitasking is something that vampires can do quite well. But when I decide to distract myself, cut myself off from outside noise, it's something that _I_ do quite well. I get absorbed in whatever it is that I'm doing and pay absolutely no attention to my surrounding environment. I'd been caught out by teachers a few times, but easily caught up on whatever it was that I'd missed out on, so it wasn't really a big deal for them.

By the end of the lesson, I'd drawn any number of shapeless images and nonsensical patterns on the card and I had started on a new sketch on the inside of the back cover. It was a rough sketch, and as yet I hadn't any idea if I would ever finish it. It depicted me, roughly, biting hungrily into the neck of the strange new girl near the front of the room. It was unfinished, and I left it as such as I dropped the book and other equipment back into my backpack. I was the first person out of the room, even though I was on the furthest side of it from the door.

I walked quickly to the classroom designated for my English class on my timetable. It wasn't the same room we'd used last year, but that didn't matter too much. Through the window, I saw that it was set up in pretty much the exact same way. I was through the door the very second that the last of the ninth grade class before filed out. That class's teacher left the room with her things and I noticed another step in to replace her.

Another staffing change, I figured. Last year, Alisha Hills had been my teacher for this class. This year, a male teacher had taken her place and was now seating himself at the teacher's desk at the front of the room. He watched as the rest of the class filed into the room and began occupying tables. None of them came over to the table I sat at, and that was just fine with me.

The desk I'd picked was a usual favourite in any class I was in; as far to the back of the room as possible. Each table was actually made from two half-hexagonal tables pushed together so that their longest sides were flush against each other. My seat was angled towards the window so that I had the outside view in my sights at the same time that I had the teacher.

I pulled out the equipment I would need for the lesson, and my copy of _Macbeth_. It was extremely rare for an English class to bore me, but with a new teacher, one could never be too sure that it couldn't happen. Having a book to read might be useful, in such a circumstance.

"Hello," said a disturbingly familiar voice.

I froze instantly, half-way through examining a tree a half kilometre away from the building. Slowly, I turned my head and looked up and to the right to see that evil, _evil_ girl was standing nearby, looking down at me with her bag slung over her left shoulder. I was dumbfounded. _Another_ class with her? What did she want from me?

"Is this seat taken?" she asked, unwittingly answering my thoughts and gesturing to the seat almost opposite from me.

I shook my head in the negative, forcing myself not to frown, and she sat down in the seat with a smile to me. Whoever had sent this demon to torment me was surely enjoying a good laugh right about now, at my expense. If I could sweat, I would have bet that bullets of it would have been dripping from just about every pore on my body and soaking through my clothes.

She was so close to me that it wasn't fair that she smelled so good or that I had to behave myself. What was I going to do about that? Her scent wafted gently in my direction, in every direction, helped along by the open window on the other side of her. I wished then that I had taken that seat instead. I would have, had I known I'd have her company. She had tied back her copper-brown hair on the walk over from the music room. With great difficulty, I tore my gaze away from her and looked to the front of the room.

The new teacher had written his name—Mr. Thomas Yanos—up on the whiteboard behind his desk; the class around me was starting to quieten down. "Good afternoon, all," the man said with a broad grin that showed gleaming teeth from behind a bushy beard that reminded me of Jackson's.

That one, single greeting was enough to kindle an instant dislike for him. How on Earth could he possibly utter such ridiculous blasphemy when he had no idea of the amount of torture that I was being forced to endure?

"My name is Mr. Yanos, clearly, but I prefer to go by Tom. Now, before we get started, I think I should answer a question that most of you no doubt have on your minds." He paused for dramatic effect—it worked … on the others. "Ms. Hills is teaching eighth, ninth and tenth grade English as of this year, so I have been tasked with stepping in for eleventh and twelfth grade classes that she would otherwise also have been doing.

"This means that we're going to be following a whole new learning format altogether now," Tom Yanos continued. I was starting to like him a little already, despite his atrociously stupid opening statement. "I run an open class. Without a doubt, we will be learning, of course. But I much prefer a class that's open to discussion about related topics and I hope that none of you will feel too intimidated to share your own unique perspectives in any such discussions that may arise. I might be the teacher here, but even I could learn a thing or two from your bright young minds."

Young? Ha! Yeah, OK.

"Also, I _don't_ discourage talking amongst yourselves while you're working, provided that I'm not trying to address the class at the time and that you're actually getting work done.

"Now …" he added.

Great, I thought again; more introductions.

As it turned out, however, Tom Yanos wasn't such a bad guy. He was overly optimistic about anything and everything, and, if possible, more enthusiastic than Paul Bastion. I had yet to scent his flavour on the air, so I couldn't make any judgements about his physical condition, but he looked to be in top shape. He went first with the introductions. He was only in his mid-thirties and had grown up in Sydney. Apparently he'd always wanted to be a teacher. He'd only been a full time teacher for a couple of years, though, and his last posting had been at a preschool-to-year-twelve school down near Brisbane.

After he had shared some about himself, he asked each of us to do the same in return. When it came around to me, I gave him the same introduction that I had to my new Math teacher. It seemed to amuse him just as much as Mr. Bastion, but this time it wasn't enough to placate him. He pressed me for more. So I gave him the practiced story, the one that we had drilled ourselves to remember as fact for as long as we were in Dysart. Though, so far, only Fiona knew any of it.

I'd been born somewhere outside of Cairns, and my mother had not survived childbirth. My father had been murdered a few years later. I had ended up in an adoption agency's care at some point, which had led to Jackson and Silanna taking me in because they were unable to have kids of their own. I had decided to keep my family's name of Winters out of respect. A couple of years after my adoption, Lisa had been adopted into the family, and she had taken our adopted family's name as her own.

Tom hinted that he already knew a little of Lisa's story, so I guessed that he had been her teacher first thing in the morning. Finished, I sat back down in my seat and watched as the girl across from me stood up to speak.

Finally, I knew her name!

She was Genevieve Holmes. Seventeen, going on eighteen, she had come up from Newcastle, New South Wales where her father and younger sister still lived. That much I already knew from her conversation with Burt last week. Aside from her younger sister, she also had two older half sisters on her mother's side. One of those half sisters, named Tayla, was living with her own father somewhere near Brisbane—she didn't know where exactly. Her other older sister, Samantha, was living with her and their mother here in Dysart.

Samantha Holmes I knew. She'd only taken the name because their mother had kept it, apparently. She was already three years out of school; somewhat personable, but because I was supposed to be three years younger than her, I didn't have any reason to actually interact with her. I'd seen her once or twice at Garden Plaza with her mother. They looked very much alike.

She sat back down when she was done, and Tom told the class that he wanted us to spend what was left of the lesson talking to our neighbours and getting to know each other a little more.

As if most of us really needed that by this point in our school lives.

In other words: it was a slacker lesson; the best way to start out the year, in my opinion. Chatter began almost immediately as Tom went back to his desk and sat down. He picked up a book from the top of his desk and opened it seemingly randomly. I almost gasped when I saw that it was an authentic original printing of Shakespeare's _Midsummer Night's Dream_.

And then I frowned. I didn't have that one yet. And I wasn't just going to go and get a modern knockoff. I wanted an original printing, like the rest of my Shakespeare plays. I must ask him where he got it from, and how much it cost him.

I heard the telltale intake of breath that meant that the girl across from me—Genevieve—was about to open up a conversation. I looked down at the desk space between us, eager to avoid eye contact.

"So," she started, "it's nice to finally meet you after—what—two run-ins now?"

I smiled weakly, still avoiding her eyes. "Three, if you count Music class." And then I wondered absently if she was talking to me because she genuinely wanted to, or because she felt obligated to do as the teacher had suggested.

She gasped. "Honestly, I didn't even notice you there!" she whispered, shocked. I grinned internally, proud of my ninja skills.

"I'm just that good," I said tonelessly. I began to count the tiny motes of dust on the table's surface. Genevieve tried to continue, obviously not satisfied with my simplistic answering.

"So, was that your sister I saw you with at lunch?"

"Fiona," I replied, looking up briefly. Genevieve smiled as if she was satisfied with at least the smallest moment of eye contact. I looked back down at the table. _One thousand, two hundred and forty-seven, one thousand, two hundred and forty-eight …_ "Lisa was in a meeting with the headmaster."

"Oh," Genevieve said softly. "Well, your friend is very pretty." I shrugged, fighting back another frown that threatened to introduce itself.

Genevieve was prying, I realised; trying to gauge the extent of my friendship with Fiona by seeing how I responded. Why she would care, or how it was actually any of her business, was beyond me at that point. Strangely, though, the prying didn't seem to bother me much at all.

"I suppose," I said indifferently. Fiona would frown if I'd even admitted that much. She didn't think she was very pretty at all. But then, most human women failed to grasp the concept of self-image correctly. _One thousand, eight hundred and nineteen …_ "But if she ever finds out that I said as much, I'll deny it." _One thousand, eight hundred and forty-three_ …

Genevieve chuckled. "Cross my heart and hope to die," she said playfully as she drew a cross over her chest with her index finger. At least she'd gotten the placement of the heart right, unlike most uneducated people who thought it was much farther to the left.

_One thousand_—I stopped, and scowled at the desk when her comment finally registered. Talk of death of any sort, even in jest, never went down too well with me. Not when I _was_ technically dead.

"Oops?" Genevieve offered quickly.

"No, it's OK," I lied quickly, wiping the scowl away and replacing it with a grim expression instead. "I've never been particularly fond of that expression." Genevieve smiled apologetically and I hoped that she would assume that it was because of the "parental death" story I had shared with the class. "So, do you prefer Genevieve, or something a little shorter?"

"Either-or," she replied with an indifferent roll of the shoulders. "My dad always calls me Eve; he knows I hate it though. Most people call me Gen for short, anyway, so I suppose that'll do for a substitute."

"Gen it is then," I replied.

I caught myself quickly a second later. A particularly strong gust of cool summer air blasted through the window, blowing Genevieve's ponytail over her shoulder and flooding my olfactory nodes again with the enticing smell that she reeked of. My mouth was wetted with venom and the fire in my throat burned hot and unforgiving in anticipation of the first drops of her blood that could be mine if I just abandoned everything and jumped over the table for her neck.

I reminded myself over and over that I had already hunted that morning; that I had already fed. Regardless of how deliciously tempting Genevieve's blood smelled right then, I was strong enough to resist her. I was strong enough to fight back the hunger that burned my throat from the inside out and threatened to cut loose of my control.

Something in the way I was staring at her must have given me away, though. She leaned back in her chair, away from me, with a worried expression playing across her beautiful face. "Mark? Are you … are you OK?"

"Hmm?" I looked up into her chocolate brown eyes and felt that curious sensation that had run through me at the IGA and again in the cafeteria whenever our eyes seemed to meet.

Those thoughts of death, of feeding, disappeared with a silent snap. Perhaps the feed that morning had helped a little, I wasn't sure. I nodded to her and shifted around the table a bit to get out of the direct path of the olfactory assault. However, this put me in the seat right next to hers. Her heart began to race noticeably at this.

"I'm fine," I said to her, my breathing halted entirely otherwise. I would have to turn my head away to suck in air with which to speak. "Sorry. I was just a little distracted there for a moment. Go on," I urged.

I noticed how easy it was to talk to her as the lesson went on; much easier than I had thought it would be. Though, it did help that I wasn't taking in her scent. I was keeping a relatively level head. I congratulated myself on the decision to hunt that morning, for I was sure that if I hadn't, I might have broken.

Genevieve looked over at the teacher, who was still reading his book, and then back at me tentatively, as if she had a question but was unsure of the best way to phrase it.

"What is it?" I asked her.

"People say that your family is rich," she said matter-of-factly. "I was just wondering … why Dysart, if that's all true?"

"Is that it?" I laughed. She blushed scarlet and I looked away for a second to regain my lost composure. "It's quiet," I said at last. "And the weather here is favourable. I couldn't think of a better place that my family and I have lived."

She wrinkled her nose at my pointed comment on the weather, and I laughed again. "OK, so the almost-constant cloud cover isn't for everybody. But it suits me and mine just fine. Most of Silanna's garden would wither and die with too much sunlight anyways, so she benefits from it in that way." It wasn't exactly a lie. _Some_ of her garden flourished better in the dark or diffuse sunlight.

"Silanna?" she queried.

I cursed myself for the slip. "My adoptive mother. My parents aren't too strict with formalities. We call them 'mum' and 'dad' when we're talking to them, like at home, but that's just out of respect. They don't mind if we actually use their names."

"Ah."

"Truth be told, though, Silanna actually prefers life in the big cities."

"But not you?" Genevieve inquired curiously. I shook my head in the negative. "Why not?"

"Too noisy," I said.

"School can be an overly noisy place in itself … regardless of where you live or how small it is," she pointed out, nodding past my shoulder. I turned my head to see that the girls at the next table were looking over at us. When they saw that I was looking back at them, they turned back to each other and broke out in synchronous giggles.

I sighed.

"Get that a lot, huh?" Genevieve asked. I turned back to face her.

"Unfortunately," I admitted.

"Well, I can't say that I blame them," she started boldly, "because you _are_ unbelievably beautiful." She stopped herself from going further, and again her face turned that interesting shade of scarlet. Her eyes were wide with shock, and she looked down at the table to avoid my straight-faced stare. I guessed that she hadn't meant to say it aloud.

The corner of my mouth twitched into a half-smile, but I wiped it clean in favour of a playful frown when she looked back up. "Another 'oops' moment?" she asked carefully. I nodded once. "Oh, I'm sorry. I–I didn't mean to … I mean, you are, but … oh damn!" she stammered, going an even brighter shade of red as each second of her attempt to explain herself passed.

"Everyone is entitled to their opinion," I said with an indifferent shrug. Genevieve looked as if she was ready to argue against that point, but I held up a hand to silence her before she opened her mouth. "Opinion," I emphasised in a way that diffused her argument.

She deflated. A moment passed in silence before she looked like she was about to speak up again. But I felt my mobile phone buzzing in my pocket. I whipped it out and she stopped herself when she realised.

"Just a moment," I said to her apologetically.

It was a message from Lisa:

_I forgot to tell you. Neville wants to see you at second break. Probably wants to plead with you to get your wild thing sister under control. *CRACKS THE WHIP* Have fun! =D_

I wasn't amused. How typical of her to leave such a message until now. I could have made a joke of it had she mentioned it while she and Fiona had been with me during first break. Perhaps that was why she hadn't given me the opening.

I didn't bother to reply to the text message, instead snapping the phone shut and slipping it back into my pocket. I returned my attention back to Genevieve and the conversation.

"Sister issues," I explained.

"That's OK," she replied cheerfully, "I totally know what that's like." I smiled when she did. "So hey, I was wondering … would it be a massive imposition if I joined you three next break?"

I cocked an eyebrow quizzically. "I kind of got the impression that you enjoyed the company of those you were with last break."

"Oh, yeah," she stammered. "I do. They're all great people; very friendly, very talkative. But, since I'm new here, I can't exactly just limit my social circle to as few people as possible, right?"

"I suppose not," I conceded, remembering how Lisa had branched out and made new friends, and how Fiona had friends other than us.

"And it's not like they have exclusive rights to me," Genevieve added slyly. I nodded. "So, is that OK?"

"Well, it's certainly fine by me," I said. "I won't be there until late, however. The message I just got from Lisa was to tell me that the headmaster wants to see me about her … behaviour."

She raised an eyebrow sceptically. "It's the first day."

"It's an ongoing issue from last year," I clarified. "Things got a little heated between Lisa and the headmaster on the last day. You can probably ask her and Fiona about it if you want to wait with them for me."

"Oh," she said, cheering again, "OK."


	11. Chapter 9

**9. SO MUCH FOR NEVER NEEDING IT **

That first month of school went by a lot smoother than I had actually expected it to. It flowed with only a single hitch. By the third week, I'd grown accustomed to the close proximity between Genevieve and I during our English lessons together to the point that I was no longer hunting on a daily basis just to be in her presence safely. I was still hunting more than usual, though, just in case; twice a week instead of once every two weeks. I won't downplay it, though. Her scent was still very powerful to me, and Lisa had worked out after the first week of school just how badly it affected me. Every time I caught a particularly strong whirr of Gen's scent, I would get really still and rigid and silent until I could bring my illicit desires under control. From there, she had connected the dots and badgered me until I'd finally admitted what had happened at the IGA.

Gen sat with Lisa, Fiona and I both breaks every second day, and with her other friends every other day. By the third week of school; Sarah and Annabel had started to come with her to our table at breaks. Neither seemed overly comfortable with that prospect to begin with, and only followed because they wanted to talk to Genevieve. But by the end of that third week, we were all laughing and joking around as if Lisa and I were normal people and the girls had always sat with us. By week four, a couple more of Gen's other friends, including Burt, had migrated to our table as well.

Lisa did her best to keep some semblance of distance between me and Genevieve; not entirely convinced that I would be able to resist indefinitely. And there was a part of me that was grateful for that—just in case. Genevieve still had no idea just how dangerous me being around was for her. Though I continued to sit with her in our English class, I was now sitting with my back to the window with her on the other side of the desk. I managed this in a way that seemed natural, and she wasn't any the wiser. In Music, I remained in my self-imposed exile. But she and Annabel had extended invitations for me to sit with them, but I politely declined every time and took my usual spot to the far side of the room, by the poster-plastered windows, alone.

Then there were the weekends; two days each week without any contact with Genevieve whatsoever. These days were both a blessing and an event to be cursed. On the one hand, I had those days free of Gen and her enticing scent, but on the other, I had grown perhaps a little attached to her company. Not having her to talk to irritated me.

Against my previous judgements, I spent most of these weekends talking to Lisa instead. The second weekend of term, I had sat down with her and talked at length—"_Finally!_" she had said—about my failed relationship with Simone. We even talked about our first day back at school, when I'd spent a good deal of my English lesson talking at length to our new friend. Typically, Lisa demanded every finite detail of the conversation, including the tone of Gen's voice with every word she'd spoken, and a play-by-play of her facial expressions and reactions.

On the third weekend of term, Lisa and Fiona had flown down to Brisbane for a shopping weekend that they had been planning for weeks—conveniently just as the state capital was to be expecting overcast and rain. They'd invited me to go with them, but I think it was only because they knew I'd turn them down. The prospect of spending two days shopping with them was … somewhat depressing. I spent most of that Saturday in my room, strumming away on the Airline to a tune that I had heard back when I had been human, but couldn't for the life of me remember the name of, or who the artist had been.

Jackson was away all that weekend, hunting in the south—Tasmania, to be precise; he has a thing for Tasmanian Tigers. They're not extinct, they just seem like it because, thanks to Jackson, they've become extraordinarily good at hiding. So on the Sunday, I was outside with Silanna, helping her as she tended to the apple tree behind the house—the tree was being stubborn this season.

By the end of the month, word had spread rather quickly throughout the school that Gen was on a friendly, first-name basis with Lisa and I. Other seniors who had known us for the past two years were going up to her when we weren't around and bombarding her with questions about us.

As I had known was coming, Adam Pollock ended his relationship with Lisa on the Monday of week four, and dropped the bombshell that he had been sleeping with one of the other seniors over the holiday period. He did so in as prideful and public manner as possible, probably counting on the crowd to discourage any form of retaliation. Lisa, typically, accepted it with an indifferent shrug and walked off calmly with Fiona, talking about the highlights of their shopping trip in the south. It wasn't a new experience for her to be broken up with.

I, on the other hand, wasn't going to let Adam's appalling behaviour slide so easily. I'd stood there glaring through slitted eyelids at Adam and growling viciously in the back of my throat. Crowd or no crowd. I intended him no actual physical harm—though the thought of ripping out his windpipe and beating him over the head with it did cross my mind—but I wanted to make sure that he didn't come away from the altercation on top.

I think it said something about the intensity of my reaction that Adam had backed away quickly, fearfully, and pale-faced. That in itself would always give those sympathetic to Lisa's victimisation something to remind him of as they passed him all over the campus for the rest of the year, I hoped.

When I talked about that day with Gen during another lax Thursday English lesson, I became a little cautious and worried when she had commented on how _inhuman_ my response to the breakup had seemed. It had apparently impressed a lot of the other seniors and frightened some of the juniors. Most of them weren't much more than passing acquaintances with Lisa and I, but none of them seemed to think that she had been treated fairly. Some of them had even started placing bets on how long it would take _me_ to resort to a violent payback by the end of the week.

I assured Lisa, much to her satisfaction, that I saw no need when my existing response would be damaging enough socially.

Gen herself had been impressed, it seemed, but as we spent more time together I began to realise that it seemed not only was it increasingly easy to talk to her, but it was increasingly easy for me to impress her. Perhaps that I was simply imagining that, however. After all, I'd already admitted to myself at that point—but not to Lisa, never Lisa!—that I found Gen insanely interesting. Perhaps it was just a hope that she found me just as interesting.

She was, after all, what Lisa had once described to me as the kind of girl that wasn't self-absorbed or conceited and very rarely, if ever, did she praise herself for things that she had done or experienced.

Friday at the end of that month ended rather dull. At the end of the day in the parking lot, Gen and Annabel had wished me and Lisa a good weekend and then gotten into Annabel's car and left. Fiona asked Lisa for a lift to work; her car had broken down and her father needed her to come in early to help with the end-of-week rush. Which left me alone. I left straight for home and enjoyed the rest of the afternoon sprawled on a deckchair in the back yard, soaking up the diluted sunlight.

Then, yes, another weekend. This time, however, I didn't have Lisa to turn to for some well placed time wasting. She'd volunteered her services for a weekend of unpaid work at Fiona's father's Polynesian restaurant at the Garden Plaza, and when she wasn't there, she was anywhere else but home.

I steered clear of the guitar that weekend; I needed a break from it. I spent Saturday instead walking around Dysart at a leisurely, human pace; covering every street, every alleyway, every off-road trail, until I'd been everywhere at least twice. Then I returned home for a nice evening of listening to some of my extensive CD collection. I picked a couple of favourites from Metallica, Debussy, The Corrs, Silver Chair, The White Stripes, and Trocadero, as well as a few orchestral compilations which included my all-time favourite, _Lux __Æ__terna_, by the Clint Mansell Orchestra. I had the music running all night, softly, while I lay on my bed and wished again for the possibility of sleep.

I knew the specific mechanics that prevented vampires from sleeping—something about how the body changes in preparation for it, and how vampire bodies were locked in whatever state they'd been in chemically and physically when they were changed. It was why vampire women could never have children, why we didn't age, why it was _extremely_ difficult to injure. But I still considered it a genetic oversight. Sleeping was good for passing away several hours of each day without actually having to do anything.

Sunday was more interesting. The cloud cover looked steady enough to last through the day, but it looked as though Lisa and I would both be out of school tomorrow, and that Silanna would be staying home as well. I made a note to myself to jump on the internet later and check with the weather service just to be sure.

I decided on a refreshing drive through the town and all the way up to the summit of Campbell Peak, a mountain not _too_ far from the edge of the town—depending on whether or not you're human.

I wasn't _quite_ at the top of the mountain when I arrived. The road that led up the slope only went as far as a small sub-peak near the top, and it was an hour hard climbing to the peak proper from there—at least, for a human. I was only going to the sub-peak today. The view there was more spectacular, as there were no great trees or bushes blocking the way.

I parked the car off the side in the makeshift parking space and walked slowly and deliberately over to the edge of the clearing. I paid no mind to the wooden waist-high pine barriers that served to keep people from wandering to close the edge of the clearing, vaulting it without a second thought. From the very edge, I could see most of the surrounding countryside, and I could most definitely see the far distant Dysart. At night, I knew, the sight was even more spectacular. You could actually see a shining, sparkling spider's wet of lit streets and buildings in the dark countryside.

The air this far up the peak was mostly fresh, free of the heavy pollution of the towns and cities dotting the country. I inhaled deeply to take it all in. OK, so it wasn't _entirely_ fresh. I could smell my car's exhaust, weakening as a chilled breeze blew it to the west. But it was the scents of alcohol, tobacco combined with the unmistakeable scents of sex that told me I wasn't the only one that visited the point. Apparently, someone had been up here since the last rainfall.

But those scents also served a purpose of their own; they reminded me of Simone.

Immediately, I pushed the thought away. Simone Karson was in the past. I had moved on in the four years since we had been together. I wouldn't let myself think about her in that way at all. She had no place in my life anymore, no place.

But the memory tried to force itself back to my conscious mind. However, it became confused by thoughts I had drawn on to distract myself from it. The two merged and warped the memory into something that had never happened, something I realised was … more of a fantasy than anything. Instead of Simone Karson laying on a bed beside me, deeply asleep with her head and arm resting across my bare chest, it was someone else; someone with disturbingly familiar, longer, copper-brown hair, lightly paled skin with the all-too-familiar blush of colour on her cheeks. A smile lit up her face as she slept. Someone I saw five days a week at school, and whose scent plagued my control every time I was anywhere near her.

Genevieve.

I shook my head violently to free myself from the images. I couldn't allow myself to think of _her_ that way either. I was not that guy, not that kind of person. She was very nice, very intelligent, very personable, and very observant person. She just also happened to be very pleasant to look at.

NO!

God, what was wrong with me?

Yes, she was attractive, but how could I have such perverted, traitorous thoughts about her? She had sought a friendship with me; a simple friendship, nothing more than that. At least, that was what I believed. Lisa and Fiona in the past few days had become convinced that Gen wanted more than just a friendship.

But what did they know? Just because they were women too.

I left the peak earlier than I had originally planned, not wanting to stay and succumb to any more inappropriate thoughts. I had been planning to stay until sunset; to watch the sun go down over the horizon and then gaze down upon the beauty of the town from above. But I knew that if I'd stayed there, more thoughts of Gen, or unwanted memories of Simone, would try to break to the surface. Sunset was still hours away, with no other available distractions that high up the mountain until then. I was determined that if I was going to continue to be Genevieve's friend, I was going to have to curb my thoughts.

As I drove down the mountain on my way back to town, I distracted myself by thinking about the homework I had been given by Jasmine Simpson: reading up on a rape case from 1982 in my textbook and coming up with a different argument that the prosecution could have used to indict the accused. The case in the textbook listed all the evidence pieces, all the testimonies, and the task was expected to be finished by the end of this coming week. It wasn't at all lost on me that if I'd stuck to my diet of the blood of criminals, I probably would have taken that man's life too.

I decided that I would work on that task tomorrow, if it was too sunlit for Lisa and me to go to school. Checking the road ahead, I saw that I was already almost to the edge of Dysart, and slowed the car down to the accepted speed limit.

For English, Tom had asked the class to read the first two acts of Shakespeare's _Macbeth._ I'd already done that, in my free time, and after the number of times I'd read the book over the years, I could recite the entire play word for frigging word. I figured I'd skip that. I could already guess that Tom was going to have us talking about it tomorrow in class, which was when the homework was expected to have been done. Because I would most likely miss the school day anyway, I'd probably call Genevieve after school and ask her for the cliff-notes version of the discussion.

Math was homework-free for me as well; I'd already completed the work in my spare period on Thursday. Music and Chemistry were also homework-free, but more due to the fact that the teachers hadn't actually assigned us any.

Something blurred ahead of me on the main road at the Hannon Crescent turnoff. On instinct, I slammed on the brakes as hard as I could without snapping off the brake pedal.

You know how in the movies, everything seems to slow down during an event like that, and you can see everything so clearly, clearly enough to react? I'm told that for humans, in real life, it's not like that. If it were, there wouldn't be so many casualties on the roads. For me, however, it was _exactly_ like that.

In that first second, I could swear I saw a streak of brilliant blonde hair atop black and brown leather, but it was out of sight before I could get too much of a look. The car skidded fifty-odd meters—I'd unknowingly been travelling at a hundred and fifty kilometres an hour, way, way, _way_ over the limit—before it came to a sudden, gut-wrenching stop.

I noticed, in that split second before the car stopped so suddenly, that I hadn't fastened my seatbelt. I had been too distracted trying to distract myself that I had overseen the need to clip it safely around me. Not that it would have been much help. There was no time to rectify that oversight, however. It took me a sixty-fourth of a second to look around and confirm that there was nobody around that would witness what was surely about to happen.

I knew that if I tried to brace myself against the inside of the car's frame at this speed and with my strength, I was likely to rip the entire vehicle in half. So instead, I let it happen. I smashed through the windshield and flew a fair distance from the car in a straight line at a light post on the sidewalk. Quickly, I reached out with my hands and wrapped my fingers tightly around the pole, altering my trajectory but not my speed so that I swung once around the pole in a horizontal arc before I released it and hurtled away. I hit the road hard on my right shoulder and rolled sideways, shoulder to shoulder, a few more meters before I came to a stop on my stomach.

I groaned at the pain. If I had been human, there would have been no way in hell I'd have survived that. As it was, my pain was minimal, but it was still present. I forced myself gingerly to my feet and checked myself over a couple of times for any damage. My shoulders were in a bit of pain, and so was my back. There were no grazes or cuts, much like I expected there wouldn't. I shot a glance at the light post and saw that where my hands had wrapped around it was indented and possibly cause enough to replace the entire post.

"MARK!" I heard the scream from behind me. The voice was panicked, unbelieving. I froze, halfway through my inspection of a large tear in the seam of my favourite jacket's left shoulder. "MARK! MARK!" the voice continued, getting closer, accompanied by the slapping of shoes on bitumen.

I turned around slowly and saw that Genevieve was running towards me at full speed. If I hadn't already been so pale, I'd have bet the colour would have just drained from my face in horror. My eyes shot open in panic.

I'd checked to see if there were witnesses! Had she been in one of the blind spots? I looked around for the car and was sick to the gut to see that it was at least a hundred meters from where I was standing. Once Gen got close enough to me, she would notice that while my clothes were torn and ripped from my involuntary flight from the car, I myself was completely unscathed. She would have questions the second she saw that; hundreds of questions.

What would I tell her? What _could_ I tell her—the truth? That almost made me laugh. "Oh, don't worry about it, Genevieve. I'm a vampire. It didn't hurt." "You're a _what_?" She'd likely have me committed to an institution.

Shit!

Genevieve stopped right in front of me and started a cursory examination of the state of my clothes; her hands were trembling out of her control. I looked past her, over her head, ignoring her fussing and her trembling as if I was in shock. I could fake that, at least. Maybe I could play this off for some extreme form of luck. She didn't need to know that I didn't have much luck to begin with. She started to fiddle with my torn jacket sleeve and then moved down my arm and held my hand up in front of her face to examine it.

Then, without any warning, she dropped my hand and wrapped her arms around me in a tight embrace. I didn't respond in any way other than to temporarily stop my breathing. She was so close now, closer than she ever had been, and her scent was drilling into me like never before. I had to maintain the shocked state for the benefit of my human façade.

I could feel her heart racing as she pressed herself against me, holding me as tightly as she could, as if afraid that if she let me go I would simply fall apart right in front of her. I could hear her sobbing into my chest quietly. I still couldn't believe that I hadn't seen her. Even if she had been in the blind spot, she would only have been there for a fraction of a second—

—and clearly I hadn't spent enough time looking.

This was entirely my fault! I had exposed myself, possibly the others as well. She knew now that there was something … different about me. Would she suspect the others, or just me? I didn't know. And if I asked her, she would know for certain that I was keeping a terrible secret. And if she knew what that secret was, would she tell anyone? Would she tell Annabel, or her mother, or her sister? Or would she go straight to the local authorities, such as they were, and tell them?

After a few minutes, she pulled away from me and I could finally bring myself to look down into her face. Tears were brimming over and spilling down her pale, beautiful face. She allowed them to run free, looking up into my eyes as the tears streamed, and choked back an obvious sob.

"Are you OK?" Are you hurt?" I didn't reply. I couldn't. She shook me. "Mark? Say something!" she shouted desperately. She made a desperate attempt to swipe away her tears, but they continued to defy her and replacements soon arrived.

"I'm fine," I said softly after a moment.

"Are you?" she choked. I nodded once in confirmation and she held my hand back up to her face to examine it again. "You _look_ fine," she said observantly, "but I refuse to believe that you _are_ fine!" she added stubbornly.

"Gen—"

"DON'T!" she screeched. "Don't you dare tell me that you're fine! Don't–you–_dare_!"

I stepped back, and Gen stepped forward to keep up with me, all the while refusing to release my hand. "Tell me the truth," she pleaded. "How bad is it? How much does it really hurt? Really?"

"Honestly," I started, "my car is probably in worse shape."

Perhaps that had been the wrong thing to say. "Your car?" she exclaimed. She turned to look at it and stiffened. The windshield had almost completely shattered, and smoke was coiling up from under the frame where I'd bet the brake pads were cooling. "A broken windshield! Whoop-di-effing-do!" That's not worse shape!" She turned back to me. I smiled at her and realised instantly how big a mistake that was.

In her frustration and panic, she thumped me in the chest with the heel of her fist. I barely felt it. Her eyes went wide and she flung herself at me again in another sobbing hug, a gentler one this time. She started screaming muffled apologies into my jacket.

"Gen, Gen," I said, taking a firm hold of her shoulders and gently pushing her away. She was openly crying now, and making no obvious attempts to stop. "Look at me," I said gently.

She did, though with her eyes so flooded with running tears, I doubted that she actually saw me too clearly.

"Look, I'm fine," I said sternly, playing hard emphasis on the word _fine_. "No bruises, no cuts, not even a single broken bone."

"H–how?" she sobbed. I reached up to wipe away the tears from her eyes, but thought better of it and dropped my hand back to my side. She noticed the movement anyway and wiped them away herself. They were replaced with fresh ones only seconds later. "How is t–that even p–p–possible?"

I hesitated. Should I give her the truth, or not? "I'm just extraordinarily lucky, I suppose," I said instead. I grinned and gently squeezed her left shoulder. "First timers have all the luck."

"Y–you should h–h–have _died_!" she insisted, "or at least been seriously h–hurt!"

"But I'm alive and well," I said, stern again. I needed to get off this street before her wailing caught the attention of the locality. I looked around at the car again and then back down into Genevieve's wet, pleading eyes. "Come on," I said. "Let me get you back home."


	12. Chapter 10

**10. WHY CAN'T THINGS JUST BE EASY FOR ONCE?**

Sunday finished like this:

I'd managed to calm Genevieve down that afternoon enough that she hadn't objected when I'd literally carried her to the car and belted her in. This time, when I'd gotten into the car myself, I'd made sure that my own seatbelt was buckled before I even started it up. Before we'd taken off, I'd chanced another look around and had genuinely been amazed that Gen had been the only witness to my foolishness. I'd been sure that she'd only be the first. Surely, someone would have heard the squealing of the tires as I slammed the brakes into overkill, or the bloodcurdling scream of Genevieve as she saw the whole thing happen.

Gen had been lucid enough to give me her address, but other than that she wouldn't say a single word. I attempted a little humour once or twice to cheer her up, but nothing worked. I knew I had to do something; I didn't want her walking through her front door looking like she'd been crying and not being able to tell her family why. But then, I was being presumptuous that she would keep it to herself in the first place.

By the time we'd reached her place, the tears had stopped flowing, at least, and her sobbing had died down to a tiny hiccup every few breaths. My lame jokes had continued to flow, attempting to draw out even the hint of a smile. There had been no cars in the Holmes's driveway; Samantha and their mother had a car each. I assumed that no one was home to notice the state of her, and breathed a silent sigh of relief. Then I'd walked Genevieve to the front door, assured her once again that I was perfectly OK, and then did the thing that I had been looking forward to the least since realising my accident had been witnessed: I asked her to keep it to herself. If she'd understood the reasoning behind it, she didn't say anything to hint it. But she'd seemed to understand that it was important that she do as I'd asked. I waited on the step until the door closed behind Gen, and then returned to my car, started it up, and drove away.

My next stop had been Dysart Panel and Paint on Murphy Street to drop off the car. I told the mechanic there that some punk kids must have busted the windshield with a brick or something when I had been at the Garden Plaza. He'd seemed to buy the story, and I told him that I would be back whenever it was done to pick it up and pay for the work. He assured me that it would be done by Wednesday. I just hoped he wouldn't take the time to inspect the damage to the windscreen and notice that it was shattered _outwardly_, as if someone had been thrown through it from the inside, instead of _inwardly_ as my story would have suggested.

Then I'd walked home from there, at twice the human walking speed. Arriving without my car, however, hadn't gone entirely unnoticed and Lisa had at once demanded to know where I'd left it any why. I'd evaded the topic for as long as I could have, but when Jackson and Silanna also started to inquire about the car's whereabouts, I caved in and told them about how my trip to Campbell Peak had ended.

Each of them had reacted differently, but each of them still pretty much the same way I had expected. Jackson had seemed curious first about the unexplained blur that had caused me to stop the car so suddenly and so dangerously—positing the likely theory that there was another vampire running around unchecked. It had kept his attention only minutes before he'd become intensely stern about my carelessness. Silanna had fussed over me, demanding incessantly to know if I was really OK. I admitted to her that there had been a little pain at first, but that it had faded long before I'd dropped Genevieve off at her home. Then, she too became stern and disapproving, much as I deserved.

Lisa had been the worst of the three of them, however, and she had most certainly not disappointed my expectations. She'd been absolutely _furious_ that I had been so careless; that I had exposed myself, and possibly all four of us in the process, to a human. She was further irked that I had then driven Gen home and not come up with a better excuse for my injury-less state. I'd tried to reassure her that there was no risk of exposure; I _had _asked Genevieve not to talk about it with anyone, because I didn't want to be bombarded with infinite, uncomfortable questions that I wasn't permitted to answer. I'd then been called foolish by Lisa for having placed so much trust in a human—she refused to even acknowledge Gen's name while she was so livid—after what that human had witnessed.

I guessed that Lisa wasn't going to be talking to me for a little while after she'd done her little rant and rave. So I'd asked Jackson to relay my request for a lift to school until I got my own car back from the mechanic on the coming Wednesday.

I guess, maybe, in immediate hindsight, I could see Lisa's point of view. After what Genevieve had seen, could she possibly resist blurting it out to one of her other friends? "Hi, Gen, how was your weekend? What did you get up to?" "Well I'll tell you, Anna, it was fraught with peril and panic! I saw Mark get thrown through a car windshield and come away without a scratch! What did you do?" And if she couldn't—as Lisa was convinced would be the case—who would she tell that would even believe her? If she told the authorities, they'd in turn pay a visit to the Paint and Panel and see that my car was in the shop with a busted windshield. That was enough, coupled with Gen's story, to warrant a visit to my home where they would undoubtedly question me about said busted windshield, and I would be forced to confirm what was, for them, impossible, or call Gen a liar.

Neither concept held any measure of appeal for me. Confirming that I had survived an impossible accident like that would only lead to further investigation, further speculation, further questioning. The story might even make it onto the news. "Dysart Local Thrown Through a Windscreen — Walks Away Without a Scratch!" Another vampire would spot that. If it was found out that I had exposed our race to the human world, even by accident, there was nothing to stop the _authorities_ from coming to Dysart in force as they had in Forks—the difference being that this time they would massacre every last man, woman and child in Dysart just to cover it up. My family and I would be on the top of that list.

But on the other hand; if I denied it all, I would be making the accusation that Gen was a liar, and slamming her credibility. I would lose her as a friend if I did that, and I wasn't entirely sure that I wanted that to happen. And if she persisted in her insistence that I was beyond normal—beyond what humans considered to be normal, in any case—word would get to the Volturi and _she_ would be silenced. I still couldn't explain exactly why, but the thought of not having her around to talk to now that I did have her made me sick to the stomach and put a foul taste on the back of my tongue.

Either option ended with Volturi involvement. Both were unacceptable to me.

My first prediction—Monday's forecasted weather—had proven not to be false, as it turned out. Though I had forgotten in all the anxiety of Sunday's incident to check the weather service online like I'd planned, Monday morning proved to be a bright and sunny day over Dysart. As such, Lisa and I were not to be found at school that day. Silanna took the day off from her studies as well, but since Jackson's classes were in the evening, he would be fine.

Lisa was talking to me again, after only a day, so my prediction on that score was not entirely as accurate. She was still greatly irritated with me for at least the first half of the day, but that annoyance slowly started to wane until, by the end of the day, I'd finally convinced her that Gen could be trusted with what she'd seen. Though, I wasn't even one hundred percent sure on that myself.

I received a call from Fiona after school had finished for the day, asking where Lisa and I had been. Though it was commonplace for us to skip school on those rare, sunny days, our activities on those days as far as anyone else knew varied from occasion to occasion. As such, Fiona always felt the need to call one of us to ask what we'd gotten up to. I gave her one of the regular answers this time; Lisa and I had gone camping at the Lords Table Mountain farther out west than Campbell Peak. She seemed satisfied, but not overly envious. Camping and Fiona didn't go well together, as we had once discovered.

Apparently, Gen had also asked about me and Lisa at school. That Fiona didn't mention the car accident was confirmation enough that I hadn't been foolish in trusting that Gen could keep it to herself. A fact I smugly pointed out to Lisa after I'd gotten off the phone. My concerns regarding Gen waned a little, though I was still worried what she would do.

Lisa and I were back to school on Tuesday, as it was a nice, cloud-covered day. Actually, it was raining pretty heavily outside, with a random dispersal of thunder, but no lightning. The rain was coming down heavily enough that it pounded like thousands of little hammers against the classroom rooves.

As the teachers couldn't make themselves heard over the sound of the pounding rain and the cracking thunder, they were each assigning reading tasks for the day. I'd already done the reading for Math, so I spent that lesson reading _Macbeth_ instead. The teacher tried to catch me out with something from the textbook section we were supposed to be reading that he was convinced I was shirking, but I rattled off the answers to his questions from memory and, appeased, he left me to my book. In between my lunch breaks during my spare, and during the breaks themselves, I spent my time in the library working on the actual homework tasks I'd been assigned. I pored over my Legal homework and added a few things, read a little more of _Macbeth_, simply because I could.

Then came the moment I had been dreading: English class. I considered blowing it off and taking off from school early. But that was just silly. So, at the end of second break, I could be found outside the appropriate classroom, my backpack slung over my shoulder as we all waited for Tom to arrive and open up the room for us.

The scent alerted me a second before the voice did. "Hello, stranger," she whispered from behind me. I turned around quickly to see her, Genevieve, standing up on her toes to reach my ear.

Her hair was loose again today, in that way I thought was the very definition of perfection, and she wore a wide grin. Her backpack was likewise slung over a single shoulder. I smiled and she rocked back to stand flat-footed. Tom arrived before I could respond and opened the classroom. We all filed in quietly and sat down in our usual places before being asked to continue with our readings.

I pulled the book out of my bag, as did Gen with her own copy, and opened it to the midpoint of _Act IV_; the witches were conjuring apparitions for Macbeth.

"So …" Gen started. I tore my eyes away from the small print in the book and looked around to make sure that Tom was preoccupied before I looked at her. The rain was still coming down fairly heavily, so I doubted that he or anyone else would hear us, and I knew full-well what was coming. "Where were you yesterday? The hospital?"

I smiled. "Nope," I said. "Lisa and I decided that we'd go camping out west for the day." I thought it best to stick to the original story in case she happened to speak to Fiona about it later. Since she had already seen me enjoying illicit speeds on Sunday, perhaps she'd believe that Lisa too was a rev-head and that would account for the quick trip so far out and back.

"Oh, that's nice," Gen said brightly. "It just seemed like such an unlikely coincidence that someone claiming that he was completely unhurt after what happened on Sunday would take the following day off school. But I guess a nice camping trip does wonders for getting all the kinks out and ironing out the bruises, eh?"

I frowned. "Well, it really was such a lovely day; just perfect to be out and away from all of this dreariness," I said stiffly. I looked around again to make sure that no one was eavesdropping, then leaned in closer. "Perhaps this isn't really the best time or place to be talking about how _lucky_ I am, don't you agree?"

"Lucky?" Gen hissed in disbelief, a defiant note biting at the end of the word. She was leaning back towards me too, the better to hide the argument from others. "_Lucky_ is winning first division in the lottery! Lucky is _not_ being thrown—"

"Hush!"

"—a hundred meters from your car and coming away from it without so much as a scratch anywhere on you," she continued, ignoring the interruption. My frown morphed into a scowl. "You know, I haven't told anyone about it, like you asked. But I think it's rather strange that you _would_ ask me not to. If I had been the one to walk away from that, I'd want _everyone_ to know how 'lucky' I was."

"Drop it, please?" I asked politely, easing up my expression. I looked back down at _Macbeth_.

She didn't. "I have a theory? Do you want to hear it?"

"Not really," I said. I continued to read the words without pause. But it was too much to hope that Gen would just leave it there.

"You're different—more different than anyone else actually realises, and more than you let on," she persisted. "I don't think you're quite …" She trailed off as she searched for a polite word to pin to the end of the sentence.

"Not quite as boring as you'd expected?" I suggested. I looked up in to her eyes while she frowned at my implication. When she looked into my eyes, she gasped, and covered her mouth with her hand.

"Mark!"

"What?" I said.

I turned on instinct and looked out through the closed window. But it was my own reflection that caught my attention. My eyes, usually the sweet amber-gold that Gen was undoubtedly used to, were now almost completely black. The last time she had seen me, tears had blurred her vision so much that she'd obviously missed it. And, of course, she hadn't seen me at all yesterday, or today up until that lesson. It was no wonder that she had been surprised by it. I thought it strange that the burning in the back of my throat wasn't insistent and painful as it usually was by this point—especially when I was so close to Gen. When I realised how long it had been since I'd last fed, I almost growled disapprovingly.

"Now, that is _very_ odd indeed," Gen mused quietly, thinking that I couldn't hear her. I turned back around to face her.

"What is?"

She looked a little taken aback that I had actually heard her, but replied nonetheless. "Your eyes," she replied matter-of-factly. "They've changed colour. They used to be a kind of gold colour. Like butterscotch, I guess. Now they're like … black."

"It's been known to happen," I said with an air of indifference. I looked back down at _Macbeth_ and resumed my reading. I got in an entire scene—Macduff's son had just been stabbed and Lady Macduff had fled the scene. I knew the play enough to know she didn't make it far before she suffered the same fate—before Genevieve picked back up on the topic and continued.

"Yes," she said thoughtfully, "but it's very odd—coincidental even—that they change colour at around the same time Lisa's do. And they change _to_ the same colour, _from_ the same colour."

What? I thought to myself, shocked. Was I back in sync with Lisa? Jesus Christ!

"With anyone else, it might be attributed to moods … or weather changes," she pressed. I tried to concentrate on the next scene in the book, but it was becoming increasingly difficult to do so. The words ran before my eyes, but didn't take hold in my mind. Her words, however, did. "I've never heard of something like this before," she added.

Good, I thought quietly to myself; then you don't know more than you should. I was starting to reconsider that hunger thing. She was prying again into matters that she was better off _not_ prying into. And when she was so prying, she wasn't such an agreeable human to be around; mostly because she was just as stubborn as I knew I could be. However, she was right about Lisa's eyes, I supposed, and it took me a moment to work out the math myself. It had indeed been a couple of weeks since her last hunt. Because we didn't exactly hunt together anymore, I hadn't really noticed.

I felt warm contact, and looked down at my hand to see that it was resting on the table in front of me and that Gen had reached across and put her hand on top of it, gently. I jerked it away reflexively, and hid it under the table in my lap. It was still warm where she had touched it, and against my wishes, I realised that I had actually enjoyed the brief contact and craved more. I banished the thoughts quickly.

"So cold," Gen said weakly, looking down at the table. Obviously, she hadn't noticed the coldness of my skin on day of my accident, when she had been examining me.

She looked as though my sudden movement had been interpreted as a rejection. So be it. If I was hungry, and apparently I was, then it wasn't entirely safe for her to be tempting me with any kind of physical contact.

The rest of the lesson went by in relative silence; the sounds of pages being turned and the calmed breathing and heartbeats around the room—Genevieve's being the only exception to "calm"—being the only sounds to be heard over the pounding rain. None of the others were speaking. None of their phones were beeping with secret text messages hidden from the teacher. The same went for all the nearby classrooms. It would have shocked me if not for the mood the conversation with Gen had put me in.

At the end of the class, I packed my book back into my backpack and stood up to leave.

"I _will_ find out what you're not telling me," Gen whispered in my ear as she followed me out.


	13. Chapter 11

**11. LATE NIGHT ESPIONAGE**

I took those words to heart. I'd already worked out in the month that I'd known her that Genevieve was not the type to idly make threats or empty promises. No doubt, the second she got home, she would begin her mission of impossibility. I, on the other hand, had relayed the conversation to Lisa. She was intrigued that Gen had noticed such detailed changes in both of us when Fiona hadn't seemed to make the connection. Fiona knew, of course, that my eyes changed colour. She didn't, however, know the same held true to Lisa.

After that conversation, Lisa had predictably reminded me that Genevieve's unwavering curiosity and her newfound determination were indeed my fault, and that it should have been expected. She was right, of course. If I had bothered to fasten my seatbelt in the first place, I wouldn't have been flung a hundred meters from the car. Furthermore, if I had been abiding by the speed limit, I would have had the time to bring the car to a controlled stop. It had been very stupid of me to allow myself to be preoccupied enough that I forgot such a small and trivial detail as a seatbelt. Now I had to pay the price for that mistake; the price of having to deflect Gen. I vowed again never to question the validity of the infernal contraption.

Lisa suggested that I drop the issue with Gen's curiosity. She said I should just forget what Gen had said at the end of our last English class. But I was finding that that was more easily said than done. It bugged me that I was unable to just leave it. She was only a young girl who was curious about some mystery she had come across, a mystery involving a friend she obviously cared for.

When she had a credible suspicion or two to present, it would present me, again, with only two options. On the one hand, I could wait to see what she would come up with so that I could adequately deny that which I _could_ deny, and hope that she would just drop it there and then. On the other hand, there was a part of me that wanted her to find out just enough to work out the rest on her own and be right.

I hadn't actually checked for myself, but it was possibly that there may be accurate information recorded in books or on various internet sources of some vampire traits. If so, with intelligence and commonsense at Gen's hands, she would eventually find something that she had noticed either in myself or in Lisa, and add two and two together.

But then that was that main part of me that considered just lying and telling her that she would get six and be wrong. And that fought against the part of me that would just nod and smile when she told me definitely that it was without a doubt four.

My curiosity eventually got the better of me, and that night—mainly to distract myself from the mind-numbing Math equations Paul Bastion had set us for homework—I could be found sitting on the roof of the house across the street from where Gen lived.

Her mother's house was a single-story classic from the late seventies. It was sturdy, safe, and beautiful, if simple. Gen's bedroom was toward the back of the house, its window facing Winterer Crescent. At the moment, the window was dark; though I could still see inside just fine. Her computer was on, but the monitor had been switched off while she was away. Her bed, a double, was a mess, as if she hadn't bothered to tidy it since she'd last slept. I felt the urge to dash through the window, make it, and then dash right back out before she came back to the room. The top drawer of her dressed was slightly ajar, but not enough to gauge its contents—not that I would.

The light came on suddenly, and she appeared in sight of the window. Her hair was damp down her back, and she was wrapped in a white towel. Obviously, she had just come out of the shower. I turned my head away slightly out of chivalrous respect for her.

It was unnecessary, as it turned out. I caught a flicker of movement and looked again to see that she had just drawn the curtains across the window while she dressed into her bed clothes.

I turned away once more and distracted myself counting the leaves on the nearest branch of a tree. And while I was doing that, I had the _gall_ to go over the Math homework. Sometimes, I'm a real sucker for punishment. It took me no time at all to solve all the homework in my head, and by then I was up to four thousand, eight hundred and nine leaves on the branch. I had to hand it to myself; I knew the best ways to distract from doing absolutely nothing.

When the curtains were flicked over again, I'd gained another three thousand and fifteen leaves. I shifted my gaze back to the house to see that the white towel was hanging from the back of the chair in front of the computer, and that Gen was now dressed in red satin button top and long pants.

She sat herself in front of her computer and switched the monitor back on. I didn't recognise the website she was on, but the webpage title caught my attention at once:

Vampires

I froze, and blinked to make sure that I wasn't seeing things. I wasn't She was clearly looking at a webpage about vampires. How close to the truth could she possibly be already? It hadn't even been seven hours since she'd stated her intent.

Quick as a flash, I yanked my mobile phone out of my jacket's inner pocket, flipped it open, and hit the speed dial for Lisa. She answered it on the second ring. "_What do you want?_"

"Straight to the point then, shall we?" I replied playfully. "Do you know a website called—" I checked the URL from the top of the browser—" ?"

There was a pause before she answered. "_Yes. Why?_"

"How accurate is the information on Vampires?"

"_Why?_"

"Just answer the question," I said testily.

Another pause. "_The information is scattered. Most accounts are way off the mark. But there are a few that have somewhat accurate information. There isn't a single myth that ties two vampiric traits together though. I'd wager the Volturi have something to do with that. Disseminate enough information and false information to keep the humans of the time from knowing the truth._"

I absorbed all this as Gen went from one sub-page to another, to another. From what I could read over her shoulders, none of those three were accurate accountings of Vampire activity. I breathed a sigh of relief.

Lisa heard it. "_What are you doing?_"

I ignored the question, and asked one of my own. "Do you have Gen's number?"

"_Mobile or landline? Learn to be more specific, Mark._"

"Mobile," I said.

Across the street, Genevieve was reading a new page entitled _The Mesopotamian Uruku_. She'd shifted her position a little, so I couldn't read any more than that over her shoulders. But I knew from my own research on my kind back in my earlier days that the _Uruku_ was one of the more accurate accounts of true vampire activity throughout the ages.

On the phone, Lisa rattled off a series of numbers which I committed to memory right away. "Thanks for that," I said absent-mindedly.

"_Where are you?_"

"Winterer Crescent," I admitted.

Lisa took a few seconds to absorb that before she responded. In a low, wary tone, she asked; "_Are you spying on her?_"

"More or less," I said. I preferred to think of it as … reconnaissance. "See you when I get home, OK?" And then I rang off. I saved Gen's number into my contact list and then dialled it.

Across the street, she jumped when her phone began to chirp at her from across the bedroom. She breathed a sigh, got up, and walked over to her bedside table to pick it up. She checked the incoming number briefly—which I knew would read _No Caller ID_—and then accepted the call and held the phone up to her ear.

"Hello, Gen," I said, grinning.

"_Uh … Mark?_" she replied uncertainly I closed off my distance-hearing so that I could focus on the voice coming from my phone. Dual-tone replies from the phone and across the street simultaneously were slightly disorienting and would throw me off. "_How did you get my number?_" she asked.

"I have my sources," I said slyly. When Gen didn't respond, I continued; "Lisa gave it to me."

"_Oh, OK._" She sighed. "_What can I do for you?_"

"I know it's rather late in the night, but I was wondering what you're up to," I said politely.

"_Not too much, really. Actually; I'm very bored. I was just going to crash for the night._"

"Really?" I said. I injected just a little bit of surprise into my tone. "So, you're not on your computer; reading up on paranormal activity from around the world for the past two thousand years?"

"_What?_" she exclaimed, surprised. She raced to her window and hung her head through it to look around. I saw her eyes dart back and forth in the darkness, finding nothing. She wouldn't think to look to where I actually was, and even if she had, she wouldn't see me in the darkness. "_Are you watching me? I don't see you at my window … or even close enough to it._"

"I'm not," I replied. I had meant it as a response to her attempts to fish out my location, and I hoped that she wouldn't ask me to clarify my answer. I didn't want to lie to her any more than I wanted to call her a liar. "Listen," I started, "I just wanted to see if you had anything planned for tomorrow … after school."

"_Uh … no; not really, no._" I smiled.

"Do you mind, then, if I take you out somewhere for the afternoon? We do, after all, have some things that we need to talk about."

I heard her gasp with shock, and then she whirled on the spot so that her back was now facing the window, and me by extension. "Gen?"

"_Yes!_" she said, a little more enthusiastically than I had thought she might. She was, after all, reading about vampires. Unless that was just a hobby of hers, she was on the right track. She seemed to realise how enthusiastic she'd sounded as well, because it was all she said.

"Yes, you mind … or yes, I can?"

"_Don't mind,_" she said quickly.

"Great," I said. I beamed, even though she couldn't see me. For some reason, I was elated that she had nothing better planned. The cheerfulness in my response hadn't even been false, as I'd intended. I frowned at that realisation. "Well; in that case, I'll warn you now that I'll not be around for second break, because I need to pick up my car from the shop."

She nodded once, but continued her involuntary silence. "Well, I'll see you tomorrow, then?"

"_Yes,_" came the soft reply.

"Goodnight and sweet dreams." I rang off and watched, a little amused, as Gen stumbled to the light switch and flipped it up to the _off_ position. The phone was still pressed to her ear, as if she could still hear me through the speaker. Then she turned and stumbled back to bed. The computer lay forgotten in the corner of the room.

When I heard her breathing had changed to that of someone who was deep in slumber, I leapt from the roof that I'd been perched upon down into the street. I dashed across to the house, vaulted into her room, and switched her computer off soundlessly.

"Sleep well," I whispered to her as I vaulted my way back through the window and dashed across town towards home.


	14. Chapter 12

**12. I TOOK HER TO THE PLACE I SAVED FOR MYSELF**

I now had something very … difficult to look forward to. From Genevieve's house, I'd gone straight home to discuss my plans with the other three, and how close to the truth Gen already seemed to be. I told them that I intended to see how much that she was sure of, and then asked their blessing to confirm any suspicions that she voiced, if any.

Jackson and Silanna both seemed to be a little uncomfortable at the prospect of potential exposure. They'd questioned me for hours to make sure that that was what I really wanted. When I'd finally convinced them that I wasn't going to change my mind, they accepted it with amazing grace. They said that I was free to tell her whatever I was comfortable telling her, but that I would have to be very careful that word of it didn't get out.

To say that I was surprised by their supportiveness was an understatement. I'd never even considered telling Simone Karson what we were, and I knew that even if I'd thought about it Silanna and Jackson would never have approved.

Lisa's reaction surprised me altogether. I'd expected her to be furious with me. After her reaction after the accident, I'd expected that she'd be advocating the need for us to leave Dysart immediately, now that Gen was so close. But she had jumped in to support my decision instead, pointing out to the other two that Genevieve had told no one about what she had seen on Sunday. She also pointed out that it was entirely likely that Gen was just an over-eager and possibly smitten young woman who had found a problem worth solving, and had ferreted out as many clues as she could.

Though, even though she was all for my plan, she met my predictions in that she did try to g et me to agree to let her come with me to keep a discreet eye on me while I was otherwise alone with the human. I told her—insisted really—that it was an unnecessary precaution. I had been able to resist the temptation so far when I'd been unbearably close to her at school, in the store, and on Sunday. I was due for a feeding anyway, as Gen had unwittingly pointed out, so I figured that I would double my usual kill in order to safeguard from any … unforeseen problems.

On Wednesday morning, I stalked cows in a farm pasture up in Moranbah. I drained them quickly without spilling, then dragged the carcasses a few Ks away from the property, spat venom onto them as an accelerant, and then promptly burned them with my handy silver lighter. Then I raced back home to get ready for the long day at school and the afternoon with Genevieve.

Now; I say "long day" because I've been around long enough to realise that when you're looking forward to something, or bored entirely out of your mind, time has this almost funny way of slowing down to prolong it for as long as possible. Contrarily, when you're _not_ looking forward to something, or you're having a great time, it has the same ability to speed up. Time is no one's friend, and I've spent decades trying to find the right balance between boredom and excitement in order to find the leverage I needed over its desire to screw with my head.

I had Music class first up. It was … uncomfortable, to say the least. I had the sneaking suspicion that Genevieve's eyes rarely left my general direction for the duration of the class, if they ever did at all. I refused to look at her though, in case I caught her gaze and caused her to enter a fit of giggles or her heart to beat faster, distracting me unnecessarily. I deliberately paid no attention to anyone or anything else except for Miss Richardson, and I absent-mindedly edited the sketch I had drawn on my first day.

I spent that first break in the instrument room in the back, with Miss Richardson's permission of course, practicing the song that I was still having trouble with. At the rate I was going, I was sure to have it ready by the time she got around to handing out the assessment.

The end-of-term assignment was a precursor to the end-of-semester assignment in that we had to write a report about a song, analysing possible meaning behind the lyrics and influences behind the music. I figured that I would work on that after I'd perfected the song. There was still a month and a bit left of term to do that.

Then I had Legal Studies, and another note-taking lesson it turned out to be. I'd already handed in my homework to the teacher and received high praise for it. Surprise, surprise. This was followed by second break. I left the school as soon as the bell went off, and Lisa got in her car and took off as well, making it seem as though she was driving me to the Panel shop. Naturally, we had the headmaster's permission to do so … albeit grudgingly.

I paid for the job the mechanics had done on the window, and saw that they'd done a complimentary buff and polish as well. I paid a little extra for remembering to use the heavy-tint glass for the front windshield, and I followed Lisa back to school in time for our next classes.

When the final bell for the day rang, I jotted down a few more of my chemistry notes for the day into my exercise book and left the book on the teacher's desk on top of Lisa's and Fiona's. Then we bolted; Lisa and I keeping it slow enough for Fiona to keep up. At the edge of the parking lot, I turned to the girls and half smiled. I was actually feeling nervous, now that the time had actually come.

"You'll be fine," Fiona assured me.

"You look presentable enough," Lisa added with an appraising smile. I rolled my eyes. "I'm going to call her later tonight. If she's not home before midnight, I'll take both of your arms off; you got that, mister?"

Fiona giggled, mistaking Lisa's comment for a joke. I wasn't fooled. I took it as the legitimate warning that it was intended as, and nodded. Lisa was strong enough to follow through on that threat. "I'll let you both know if I survive this," I said.

This time, it was Lisa who rolled her eyes. I said goodbye to each of them and turned on my heel. When I arrived at my car, Genevieve and Annabel were both standing there, whispering excitedly to each other.

They both looked up at me suddenly. "Hi, Mark," Annabel said politely. She flushed only a little, and didn't quite meet my eyes.

"Hi, Anna," I replied. She opened her mouth to say something, but couldn't seem to find the words. "Are you coming with us?"

It was in jest that I asked. But she didn't seem to realise that, and she shot a look that was half wistful at Gen, before turning back to me and shaking her head without a word spoken.

I smiled. "Hi, Gen. Still on for this afternoon?" I said.

"Yes, yes, certainly," she said quickly, "definitely."

Her face flushed with more colour than even Annabel. I nodded with a smile and got into the car to wait while Gen promised to tell Annabel everything when she got back home. They hugged, and then Gen got into the passenger seat and strapped herself in.

"Where … where are we … you know … going?"

I thought about that for a moment. I hadn't actually considered where I would take her for the afternoon. I hadn't been on an actual date in a century. All my time spent with Simone had been at her place, under the watchful eyes of her parents. This was an entirely new experience for me. I considered a few possibilities; Lake Vermont, a little north-east of Dysart, my own home on the outskirts of the town …

Wait! Date? _Date?_

"Have you ever been to Campbell Peak?" I asked her as I turned the key in the ignition and started the car. She shook her head in the negative, as I had expected. "Where, there are a couple of good spots there," I explained. "One of them is a sort of unofficial camp clearing near the peak, and it offers a fantastic view of the surrounding countryside."

"And the other?" Gen asked carefully.

"You'll see when we get there," I promised with a grin. I pulled out of the parking space and drove away from the school and down the main road.

"Is that where you were coming from on Sunday when you … you know … _didn't crash_?"

"Yes," I said quietly. "Not at the very peak, though. It's quite a special spot, and I always thought I'd reserve it for the most special occasions." She blushed at that. "You do that a lot, you know," I pointed out, watching her as I drove.

"Do what?" she asked, blushing further.

"That," I said.

"No, not a lot," she corrected me. "Just a lot when I'm around you." Her eyes shot open at the unexpected truthfulness and she turned her head to look out through the open window at the passing buildings. "I'm sorry," she said quietly.

"What for?" I stopped behind a blue station wagon at a give way sign and waited.

"Saying stuff like that," she clarified.

I hesitate to pick the right words. "Is it true? What you just said," I said. She nodded. "Then don't be silly. The truth is nothing to be apologising for."

"It doesn't make you … I don't know … uncomfortable?"

"Not really," I admit with a shrug.

"Why not?"

"It simply doesn't." I checked through the windshield to see that the station wage in front was turning onto the adjoining road. I pulled up to the intersection and checked for incoming traffic before I pushed on. "To be honest, you're the first person I've ever come across that is so honest." I didn't elaborate that I meant _human_ person. "Most people tend to think one thing, say another. It's refreshing to come across someone who says what's on her mind … even if sometimes she shouldn't be thinking certain things."

Gen smiled and pursued my explanation in a different direction than I had intended. "So; have you known a lot of w—people?"

"A lot of people, definitely," I said to her, looking over as I took off down the main road leading out of the town to the west. "A lot of women—that's what you were thinking, yes?—well that would depend on your definitions of 'a lot' and 'women'."

She didn't return my gaze; merely continued to stare out thought the window at the passing scenery. The wind rushing by flicked her hair about her face and threw her scent around the car's interior.

Perhaps my reply had made her a little uncertain about me, self-conscious and guarded. Perhaps she thought that compared to other women I'd known, she would never measure up. I looked ahead of me now as I drove. The silence was a bit uncomfortable, even if the topics she chose weren't. I'd grown accustomed to there always being something to talk about when I was with her. Now that there was nothing—or more accurately, because she seemed too nervous and timid at the moment to talk much—I was at a loss. I wished that she would say something.

We were halfway to Campbell Peak already. Again, I was pushing the speed limit. It wasn't a particularly smart move with Genevieve in the car, but there wasn't long left in the day and I liked having my arms attached to my shoulders.

My imagination began to stir in the back of my mind, threatening to occupy me again with horrific or erotic images that I had no place for. I had to have something to stave them off before they gathered in force and began their assault. I beat them back with as much self control as I could, forcing them as far back into the darkest corner of my mind as I could. But that only served in decreasing the control I exercised over my hunger, and I felt that familiar burn in the back of my throat as Gen's scent filled my nostrils.

"This is nice," she said suddenly when we reached the foot of the peak and I slowed to a more respectable speed. She hadn't seemed to notice the difference.

OK; I thought. Whatever I had thought earlier about her, I take it all back. This girl was no demon of temptation; she was a saviour _from_ it. Then burn in the back of my throat was forgotten almost at once, and the disturbing images in my mind disappeared with a silent snap.

"The scenery?" I asked. Gen hesitated for a brief moment before she nodded her confirmation. I wished again that I could trade my telekinesis for telepathy; such an advantage I would have had at that very moment. I could avoid most—if not all—of the awkwardness. "Yes," I said. "It's very nice up here."

"Probably due to all the rain," Gen said glumly.

"Ah, it's not really all that bad." I smiled and chanced a look at her to see that she was looking back at me curiously. I took that as a request for an explanation. "When you've been here a while, you start to appreciate the differences between Dysart and most other places."

"Such as?"

"Rare sunny days, no hustle and bustle of the busy city life," I started, ticking them off on my left hand while steering the car with the right. "The scenery, as you mentioned, the lack of pollution."

"Interesting people," she hinted with a shrug.

"Yeah, you could throw that one in there, too. Though, the only two people around here that I think are interesting at all aren't native to Dysart."

Halfway up the peak, we reached a fork in the gravel road. The left turnoff led to Halfway Landing, which offered a—wait for it—halfway decent view of the sunset. I took the right fork, which continued up the mountain.

"Fiona, for example, moved up here from Adelaide."

"And Annabel is from Carlton," Gen said slyly before I could finish.

"And—" I stopped, and raised a questioning eyebrow. "I beg your pardon?"

"Fiona and Anna," Gen repeated. "The only two people in this town that come from somewhere else in the country and could possibly interest you."

"Well … yeah, I suppose that Anna's interesting in her own quirky way," I started, confused. "But, as you've probably noticed, Anna and I don't have much in the way of conversation. She's one of the people around town that are intimidated by me."

"Oh, no. Not at all," Gen corrected. Her smile was a knowing one, as though there was something about Anna I'd clearly misread. "At least … not in the way you think."

"Explain."

"She fancies you." Gen grinned.

"She … what?" I said incredulously. I reran the memory just to be sure that I had heard her correctly. "Hold that though; we'll get back to it another time. The second person I was actually thinking about was _you_."

Gen blushed again.

"There you go once more," I said with an amused chuckle.

"Stop making me do it, then," she said softly. I chuckled again.

The rest of the drive went quietly from that point. I realised that I had made her a little uncomfortable with my statement. As such, I didn't have the opportunity to press her about her insinuation that Anna was attracted to me. I mean, sure, I'd caught her giggling childishly with her friends while looking at me when she thought I wasn't noticing. But that was a typical reaction amongst human females when I was around. I'd taken it as such. I hadn't actually given thought to the fact that she might _like_ me despite my strangeness, beyond my appearance.

Before we reached the camping spot near the true peak, I asked Gen to close her eyes and keep them closed until I said she could open them. She obeyed, reluctantly. I stopped the car in the small clearing and got out swiftly. Then I helped Genevieve out of the car and locked it before turning back to her.

"OK," I started, "now don't be alarmed. And keep your eyes closed."

"OK, Mister Top-Secret Guy."

I chuckled and picked her up—one arm under her knees, and the other arm around her back with her left arm wrapped around my neck for support. I bent my own knees slightly and then sprang high into the air towards the rock face in front of my car. I heard the sharp intake of breath from Genevieve as she felt the unexpected shift in gravity and atmosphere around her and fought back the urge to smile smugly at having caught her off-guard.

There was an outcropping of rock a few meters away and I landed softly on it, launching myself higher as soon as my feet were solidly planted. I jumped from outcrop to outcrop, rock to rock, up the face of the cliff, not once coming close to losing my footing or balance when I landed in places that barely had enough room for one of my feet, let alone two. I never slipped. Eventually, I landed with a crunch on frosted ground.

"What," Gen asked, shocked, "in the name of God just happened?"

"You can open your eyes now," I offered gently.

She did, and stared straight into mine. I lowered her slowly to the ground, allowing her feet to touch the grass. She wrapped her other arm around my neck for support as she righted herself.

"Whoa!" she breathed. "Dizzy." I held onto her gently by the arms to keep her steady until she assured me that she was fine. Then she turned on the spot and looked around. "Wow!"

"I'm glad you like it," I said with a smile. "But this, however, isn't the setting that I had in mind for this afternoon."

"Then lead on, kind sir," Gen urged. I took her hand in mine, noticing the increase in her heart's beating pace, and let her across the plateau until we came to a spot near, but not too close, to the farther edge of it.

"Welcome," I began, "to the true summit of Campbell Peak."

I waited as she slowly lowered herself to a seated position on the smooth rock jutting up from the ground before I sat down next to her, still gently clasping her hand. She looked out over the edge and down at the countryside lain out below us. I could tell from the rate her heart was beating that while she didn't particularly enjoy being up this high—she'd mentioned once her insane fear of heights—she was definitely enjoying the view.

"I said …" I started, carefully going through my vocabulary at lightning speed to pick the right words. "I told you last night that we had things to talk about." OK, so maybe that wasn't so difficult to say after all.

"Yes," Genevieve replied, looking expectantly back at me.

"Firstly, however, I have a question for you." She nodded for me to continue. I waited for another moment as she tucked a stray lock of hair behind her ear. "Yesterday, you said that you were intent on finding out what secret you assume I'm keeping to myself. You said that you would find out what I wasn't telling you, and you made the insinuation that I'm more … different … than I would have others believe."

Gen nodded silently, and, predictably, blushed scarlet. That was becoming increasingly distracting, I found. I guessed that those accusations and insinuations had now left her feeling ashamed and foolish now that I was looking at her and reminding her of them.

"Do you have any theories?" I asked.

"Just the one," she whispered, uncertain.


	15. Chapter 13

**13. SO NOW YOU KNOW**

"Well, I honestly expected that much," I admitted. Genevieve swallowed nervously. I resisted the urge to stand up and start pacing. I was just as uneasy about this entire conversation as she seemed to be, and that was making me fidgety. I was just a lot better at hiding it than she was.

I avoided her gaze for a few moments so that she could see that I wasn't trying to come off as hostile. "You're a very intelligent young woman, you know. If you hadn't come up with a single theory, I really would have been disappointed."

Not exactly the truth. Close enough to it, though. Part of me would have been relieved.

She said nothing, and it didn't take a genius or a mind reader to work out why she was so silent. "Don't worry," I assured her, looking into her eyes again. "I didn't bring you up here so that I could hurt you or anything. I promise. I just wanted to know what you thought. We'll start with the facts, shall we?"

She nodded, and I waited for her to speak up. Eventually, though, she did remember how to use her voice. "Well, the smallest detail I can think of," she started uncertainly, "is your eyes."

"Go on," I urged.

"They change." There was confidence in her tone now. I nodded. It was the obvious place for her to start making her point. "I know that you said it just happens … and yeah, I've known some people whose eyes change colour depending on their mood. But I don't believe that this is the case with you … or Lisa."

"Why not?" I asked politely.

"Because in those cases, the colour changes are subtle—blue to green, or green to brown, or vice versa. Never in my life have I ever come across, nor heard of, anyone who had the same shade of colour that you and Lisa have. And you both _share_ an eye colour, which is puzzling when you both insist that you're not related by blood in either way."

Of course not, I thought to myself. Neither of us actually _had_ any blood left in us, save from feedings. I resisted the urge to smile at my own thought, so that Gen wasn't interrupted.

"Which is it, by the way," she asked suddenly.

"Pardon?"

"Which colour is dominant? Gold or black?"

"Gold, I guess. The black comes on gradually over time unless …" I faltered, looking for the right words. If I downright told her what changed my eyes back to the gold colour, it would leave her no doubt what I was. I couldn't do that, on the slight chance she was wrong. "Unless I take certain steps."

"I see." She slipped her hand away from mine. "They change from that really nice colour to … well … the black. I noticed that as the fortnight went on, your eyes got darker and darker until they were completely black, without a single trace of the nicer colour to be found. But then, in the space of a day, they changed back to that impossible gold. That's no subtle change. And they do that at the same time Lisa's do. Now; I believe in coincidences, but that's just too farfetched a coincidence to count as one.

"Your eyes were gold on both of the first times we first met: at the IGA before school started, and then in English on the first day. They were a little darker at the IGA, though, but not by much. Then yesterday, they were black as night, and now they're back to that beautiful gold. That, coupled with the fact that you seemed overtly hostile yesterday … and I don't think it was because of what I was trying to talk to you about. You're never hostile when your eyes are lighter."

OK, so maybe I _wasn't_ perfect in hiding my moods. "You're very observant, have I mentioned that?"

"I've been told as much," she said with a shrug and only a slight flush of colour in her cheeks. "My parents used to call me the Miniature Sherlock Holmes."

"Well," I started, "the name certainly fits. Continue."

Genevieve frowned, and I interpreted it as irritation that she hadn't heard an explanation about how my eye colour impacted my moods—rather than the reverse, which was uncommon amongst humans. I wasn't going to give it to her; not unless she was correct in what she thought I was. If she wasn't then there was no need to explain it at all.

"Next," she said, "is the incident from Sunday." I'd wondered when she would bring that up, and why it hadn't been the first thing on the list of evidence against me. It seemed to be the strongest point of her research that she had to go on regarding my … strangeness. "Nobody— no _human_ could possibly have survived that without some form of major injury. And yet, you just walked away from it without a scratch on you."

"My jacket wasn't so lucky," I said with a grin.

She frowned again at my attempt to lighten the situation a little. "I watched the entire thing happen, Mark. You went flying through that windshield, through the air, straight at that streetlight. And then, somehow, defying all laws of physics, you swung away from the pole, hit the ground, and rolled end over end. But when you got up, the only damage I could find was to your clothes and your car!"

"Yes …"

"Now; from that, I can't even fathom how strong you are," she continued. "Not strong in the human way of describing it, I'm sure. But … something else—something _more_. And just as fast. I mean, lack of injury aside, you were launched from that car pretty damn fast and were still able to somehow change your trajectory away from the streetlight. That would take reflexes beyond anything any _human_ is capable of. That would take reflexes faster than the fastest striking snake!" I nodded to signify that she was on the right track. "Then there are other, smaller, things."

"Such as?"

Gen reached for my hand again and placed it palm-up in her own before covering it with her other hand. "You are almost as white as snow, you know. Your skin is as cold as ice," she said, looking down at my trapped hand. Her hands felt nice around mine; soft, warm, delicate, and not quite as colourless as my own. "And on Monday—one of this town's rare, so I'm told, sunny days—neither you nor Lisa were anywhere to be seen."

I swallowed. "We were camping," I said unconvincingly. Gen shook her head. "How could you possibly know any different?"

"I asked around." She paused, still looking down at my hand. "Fiona and Anna both said that it's common practice for the two of you to take sunny days off school, and that neither of you are ever seen on those days. That's pretty suspicious."

"One flaw," I said quickly.

"Oh, this'll be good." She shuffled around so that her entire body was facing me and looked up into my eyes. She still had a hold of my hand, too, which was making it that much harder for me to concentrate on the words. I managed, somehow.

"The day I first saw you at the IGA; the sun was out then."

But by how fast she responded to that lame attempt at a defence, I realised that she'd been expecting it. "It was late in the afternoon, and you would have been able to park your car in the shade of one of the buildings."

"My car has windows; did you also happen to notice that?"

"_Tinted_ windows," she replied.

Damn! She _was_ good. "So your master theory is …?" I pressed.

"I'm getting to that," she said impatiently.

She took her top hand away from mine and reached out slowly towards me. Against my better instincts, I froze, not knowing what to expect from this unknown move and unsure of how to respond when I found out the intent. Was she reaching for the jacket? My neck? No. I felt her hand make firm contact with my shirt, above where my heart no longer beat, and I knew.

Her eyes lit up, as if Christmas morning had come almost a year early. I knew that she was positive now of whatever her theory was. There wasn't a way on Earth that I could explain away a heart that didn't beat.

I held her gaze, watching all the facts scroll back and forth in her own mind as she added them all together to come to the most obvious of conclusions. Adding two and two—getting four. She held her expression, trying her best not to give away what she was thinking. In that moment or two of silence as she mulled it over, as I watched her, as she watched me watch her, I ran over my options once more.

Confirm or deny?

I had already decided that I would confirm her suspicions if she was right, but now that I thought about it, if I had decided to change my mind now and deny it all, there was no way I really could. My lifeless heart didn't beat beneath my chest, and she had felt as much. There was only one medical condition in the world that could explain that: death.

Six, part of me screamed in silence. Say it's six! Get it wrong so I can tell you that you're wrong and you'll be … well, relatively safe!

But no. Her eyes told me everything that she was thinking. I didn't need to be a telepath after all, at that moment, I just knew. I could see it plain as daylight on her face.

"Say it," I said quietly, still watching her. "I want to hear you say it out loud."

She didn't respond at first, and her eyes gaze dropped away from mine to stare at the hand she continued to press against my chest, searching for something that just didn't exist anymore. My chest rose and fell under her touch as I breathed in the cool air of the peak, but that was all the movement she would fell. I waited for her to speak up as her eyes darted back and forth over my features. She took in every detail from the paleness of my skin to the gold of my eyes to the way my features seemed to her to be chiselled straight from stone. Then she looked back up into my eyes, mouthing the key words to herself; cold, pale, sun, heart.

"Vampire," she breathed.

I didn't say anything in response, but merely nodded my confirmation. Her heart increased its tempo slightly, but not enough to indicate fear to me. She jerked her hand away from my chest, but made no other moves to distance herself from me at all.

"Does that worry you?" I asked her.

She placed her hand back to where it had been before, covering my hand. "Not at all," she said, shaking her head. I could hear the lie, even if she couldn't. "It surprises me, though."

"Why?"

"Because, last I checked, vampires were the stuff of myth and legend," she stated matter-of-factly. "To find out that they're actually real? Even if I had believed in the existence of vampires before, I never, _ever_ would have thought I'd meet one. I was expecting to be laughed at for even suggesting that you are one!"

"Would you prefer that?"

"GOD NO!" she wailed. I nodded. "Somehow, though, I gather that you already knew that I suspected what you were. Just as you somehow knew what I was doing last night."

"I was watching you last night," I admitted.

"Why?"

"Are you seriously asking me that question?" I said dryly. "When you said that you were going to find out my secret no matter what, I became curious and … worried," I confessed. "So I planted myself on the roof of one of the nearby houses"—no way was I going to let her know just how close I'd actually been—"to see what you would find out. When I saw you reading up on the _Uruku_ legends, I knew that it wouldn't take you more than a second to put everything you'd observed about me into the correct context.

"I spent last night and this morning debating with myself and my family the pros and cons of you knowing, and what we would do about it; whether we would deny it all and tell you that you were completely off-base, or confirm your suspicions and tell you the full truth.

"I had to see how much you were certain of first, though, and if you could guess it yourself without having to be told. If you got it right, well then I would tell you that you had."

I stood up, pulling my hand away from hers, and walked over to the very edge of the peak. I heard Gen's heart kick into a faster gear, anxious at how close I was, but I wasn't worried.

"Even after making the decision, I had yet another to make. You see; it's against our law to reveal ourselves to humankind. I had to struggle with the decision to let you live or not if you'd guessed it right."

Her heart's tempo increased again, beating so fast now that I worried. I closed my eyes and took a deep, steady breath to calm me, to tear me from temptation.

"And what did you eventually decide?" she asked. I noted the anxiety that had crept into her soft tone, the surprise that I would be so brutally honest and tell her what I had.

"You're still alive, aren't you?" I chuckled. "And did I not say that I wouldn't hurt you?"

"Yes, you did."

"Then you know my answer to that question already."

She guessed the obvious flaw in that right away, surprising me once more with her intelligence. "Then what's to stop the keepers of your law from fixing that issue, if you won't?"

"They would have to know that you know. And I have no intention of telling them … ever," I said bitterly.

If she picked up on my tone, she made no comment of it. In fact, she was silent behind me once more, and her heart slowed to—well not quite—its normal pace. "But why?" she asked. "Why confirm it all, and then break your own law to keep me alive when I'm not supposed to know? Why? I'm only human, only … food."

I scoffed and turned so quickly to face her that she flinched. She was still seated on the edge of the rock, looking at me though, but I kept my distance. "I haven't fed from a human in over eight decades. Lisa never has. And Silanna and Jackson have abstained for only a little less time than I have. None of us about to start now. We're beyond that—me, especially. Regardless …"

"Regardless of…?"

I sighed. "Regardless of how enticing your scent is," I said agonisingly. Her face contorted in confusion, and I managed a brief smile in appreciation of her innocence. "Everyone, vampires and humans"—I wasn't about to drop the bombshell about shape shifters and werewolves—"has their own unique, distinct scent. Human scents are more powerful and appealing … far more appealing … to us because you're our natural food source. But occasionally, one human comes along that makes everything all that much worse. A human that smells so good that it drives vampires crazy with the bloodlust. And that human would appeal to certain vampires a lot more than it would others.

"That isn't much of a problem to those of us that have decided to continue living … _traditionally_. They'd feed in an instant and give it nought a second thought. But for those very few of us, like me and my family …" I trailed off again. "It's not always easy. Some of us are lucky never to discover that one human, or to not be as affected. And some of us aren't strong enough to resist.

"That day, at the store, before school started … when I caught your scent, you can't possibly imagine how close you were to those being the last seconds of your life. I came _so_ close to giving in to those primal instincts and bleeding you dry. It took everything that I had to stop myself from feeding that day. You can't imagine, after eighty years of staying clean and not giving in to the temptation of human blood everywhere I went, that coming so close when I saw you … I lost pretty much all self respect I had for myself when that moment passed and I reasserted control. I kept myself away from even my own family because of the burning shame that I felt. I even considered not going back to school, because I knew that you would be there."

I could see that Gen was growing … uncomfortable? No. So help me, she was growing more curious as I went on. Didn't she know any better?

"If you don't live off human blood, what is it then that you do eat? Is that even the right word?"

"Animals," I replied simply. "'Drink' would be a more accurate adjective. Each of us goes hunting once every couple of weeks. Sometimes, we go for wild animals; hunting where there's a particular over-population of a certain animal so that the deaths of a few won't be noticed by the wildlife endangerment organisations. Other times, we just pick off a couple of livestock from a farm."

"Ah, OK," Gen said with an understanding nod. "But you're trying to say that I … uh … smell good?" She seemed to be completely and utterly uncomfortable with the phrase.

"Yes. Lisa's noticed it too, but I doubt that you're as strong to her as you are to me." I frowned. "To use an alcohol analogy; picture me as the recovering alcoholic."

"I have the number to a group you can go to, if you need it," Genevieve joked.

I smiled at the humour, and continued. "Picture me as the recovering alcoholic," I repeated. "Walking around a human population is like said alcoholic walking through a liquor shop. I try, and succeed, in resisting the temptation to try just one of the drinks I can see around me, regardless of how much a part of me misses it. But if you throw that alcoholic into a cellar filled with row upon row of rich brandy, or aged wines, lids removed so the smell can permeate the air and draw them in … you might have an idea of what I'm trying to say."

"That would be me then; the wine?" Gen clarified.

I nodded.

Then she nodded. Understanding lit her eyes as something occurred to her. I was pretty sure what that was. "That look you got in your eyes on the first day of school," she breathed. "That was just after that breeze blew in through the window and straight over me. It must have carried my … scent … straight into your face. That must have been _torture_. I'm so sorry!"

"I moved closer to you because it took me out of the line of fire. It minimized the risk … slightly. That's why I've had my back to the window ever since that day. If it had happened again, at a time when I was … less fed … I'm not sure what might have happened."

"But that doesn't answer my question," she said with another frown. Seriously! I had never ever seen her frown so much. She was going to give herself premature wrinkles.

"Why I decided to let you live, knowing as much as you do about me and the others and knowing the potential exposure risk it entailed?" She nodded. "Well, I would have thought that it was rather obvious why I made that decision," I said evasively.

"Not to me," she replied. I covered those few steps back to the rock and sat back down on the smooth surface next to her. I didn't look at her right away, though I knew her eyes were on me. "Will you tell me, or am I to attempt a guess?"

"I …" I faltered.

"How old are you?" she asked suddenly. I didn't know how it was relevant, and I looked up into her eyes.

"Twenty," I said.

She giggled. "And you're still in school? Ridiculous! But, no, I meant … how _old_ are you?"

"Oh," I said, recognising the distinction. "One hundred and twenty."

"You've been around since before my great grandparents were born … and in all of those years, you never mastered the skill of putting a sentence together when a girl asks you a simple question?" she teased.

"No. I have no trouble answering your questions."

"Then please answer. Why won't you kill me? Why take the risk?" she insisted.

I sighed. Defeated by a human? How did that happen? Oh, the indignity! I had been planning to discuss my feelings first with Lisa or Fiona before the subject ever came up with Genevieve. I definitely hadn't planned this afternoon to be the day I bore all. Somehow, though, I hadn't been able to stop myself from reaching that point.

Could I just leave it where I had and bring it up another day? Could I do that kind of thing to her when being the victim of it myself from anyone else annoyed me to near animalistic frustration?

The answer was simple: no, I couldn't. It was going to have to come out eventually. Somehow, this … this … well I could hardly even think of her as weak anymore. How could she be weak and yet hold such power over me? How could she have that power to begin with? I didn't even know of _vampires _that had "extra" abilities to make people do what they were hesitant to do. How could this one girl do it to me?

"I have feelings for you," I said softly. I swear, at that moment, her ears must have been borrowed from a vampire, because she heard every word. "More than that; I think I'm in love with you."

Gen's face went bright red in record time, and it was brighter and redder than any other time I had seen her blush. She opened her mouth to say something—likely a protest that I couldn't be so silly—but the words were lost on their way up and she closed it again. She tried again, with the same failed response.

I started to formulate an apology, something to make her say something. I was just opening my mouth to speak it when she moved. Faster than I would have thought possible for any human, she pressed her warm, perfectly shaped lips against mine. It caught me off guard. Hell; that was an understatement. If I'd been human, I would seriously have just gone into cardiac arrest. As such, I wasn't as responsive to the kiss as she had been expecting.

She pulled away just as quickly as she'd darted forward and looked at me apologetically, shamefully. I looked back at her with eyes just as wide as her own, but in shock, rather than what she was feeling.

"S–sorry!" she stammered desperately. "I just … when you said … I mean I … oh, I'm sorry. I really—"

I decided that it was the perfect time to give her a taste of her own medicine. With the practiced restraint from previous experiences, I moved forward with lightning-fast speed, but pressed my lips against hers gently, softly, so as not to damage her.

I tried hard not to lose myself too much in that simple contact. My hands slowly travelled down from her shoulders to her back and tangled amongst her dark hair. She wound her own arms under my own, entwining her fingers in my hair as well, pulling my face closer to hers, if possible. She shuffled across the rock's smooth surface towards me as our lips continued to crush against each other's. Her lips opened slightly, tongue teasing my cold, firm lips, and that was my cue that things had gone far enough for the afternoon.

I pulled away, just far enough that our lips broke apart. She seemed reluctant at first to give up that contact, moving forward as I shifted away in order to try and keep our lips merged. Eventually, she got the hint and opened her eyes to look at me as she withdrew.

She smiled. But it wasn't a smile of amusement, or of general happiness, like I saw on a daily basis. It was a smile of triumph, of finally obtaining something that she'd obviously wanted for a while.

"Oh, my," she breathed.


	16. Chapter 14

**14. MURDER MOST … MURDEROUS**

That afternoon spent with Genevieve at the top of Campbell Peak had been the best day of my extended life to date. For the first time in one hundred years, I was grateful for the day that I had been attacked and changed by a pair of ravenous vampires.

I mean, that's not to say that I wasn't glad to have known Jackson, Silanna, Lisa and Fiona, but I'd never before been in love so strongly as a vampire, and I'd begun to think that it wasn't possible for me. I knew that Jackson and Silanna had been pretty close for a long time, but I hadn't actually believed deep down that what they felt was truly love. I'd thought that because of what we were, we were no longer capable of those kinds of feelings, those emotions.

But now that I was in love—really and truly—I treated it like the miracle I believed it to be.

In retrospect, I soon realised, it had the added side effect of proving Lisa right: some girls _were_ worth the effort.

I spent as much time with Genevieve as possible from that afternoon forth. In English class, we were now sitting side-by-side, our backs to the window—now that she know the threat they posed to her safety—and our heads bent in conversation. Sometimes we talked about class work or the book we had been tasked with reading, sometimes it was other stuff. She had a lot of questions that she thought she deserved the answers to regarding my nature. In Music, I was now sitting with Gen and Annabel. This didn't escape notice.

Occasionally, I would spend a lunch break in the instrument room on one of the guitars, practicing the song I had decided to do for my end-of-semester assignment. I _had_ been planning to stick with _Fade to Black_ by Metallica—one of my favourite modern artists. But since my declaration of love to Gen—and her subsequent non-verbal return of the sentiment—the fact that we were not officially an "item" meant that it didn't seem such a fitting song to choose. I'd decided instead that I would play something from the heart that didn't beat but still, somehow, felt: _Make it Right_, but the widely unknown band, Thirteenth Pillar. Someone I'd gone to school with years ago was the nephew of the band's guitarist. I liked their music, as short lived as they were.

Lisa no longer made any effort to planet herself between me and Gen in the lunch hall during breaks we spent together. She probably realised since we were dating now that she couldn't plausibly get away with it. But she did keep a discreet eye on us. Gen quickly grew irritated with that, even though she now knew the reasons behind it. Fiona seemed delighted that Gen and I were—as she put it—_finally_ together, and held nothing back in pointing out that she'd seen it coming from the first day. She was quick to enter into conversations with Gen about me, or anything of interest really. I was able to tell her with a look that Fiona knew nothing of mine and Lisa's true nature. She kept quiet about that. Annabel became easier to talk to as well. It was explained to me after a few weeks that she'd lost interest immediately when my status had changed to "unavailable."

Between classes on Mondays, I rushed out of whatever class I happened to be finishing to meet up with Gen at hers so that I could walk her to her next lesson before dashing off to my own. The exception to this was Music, which we both had, and we shared the English class after it. We took it in turns to ask each other questions during out time together, and I was learning quite a bit about her—like the fact that the only extra-curricular activity her father had pressured her into that she actually enjoyed was violin lessons. I made it a point to ask her to play something for me some time.

I was starting to notice, too, the envious, spiteful looks that she was receiving from some of the other senior girls. The reason was immediately apparent—they were all jealous. A lot of them had been schooling with me and trying to grab my attention for the past two years. They were more than a little irritated that the new girl in school had managed to hook me in a matter of weeks. Gen took it all in stride, not even batting an eyelash in response, and acted as though everything was just fine. I was a different story. One time, I growled at an eleventh-grader that I'd caught shooting that same look at Gen. I'd been scolded for it later by both Gen and Lisa, who both warned me about the risks associated with acting in ways that clearly were not human. But as long as that girl never looked at Gen that way again, it was well worth the reprimand.

Outside of school, we divided our time up as best we could between time spent together and time spent on school work. I'd been introduced to Gen's mother and sister at the end of March, when we had been together for a month already, and they were both interesting and nice. Of course; I had run across Robyn Holmes—Gen's mother—a few times in my years in Dysart, but had never actually spoken to her before. She insisted that I call her Robyn, rather than Ms. Holmes (she's kept her ex-husband's name). Gen's sister preferred Sam to Samantha. She kept me in her room for an hour when I'd first been introduced, with only her for company. I was a little anxious at first about her intentions, but as it turned out she was only interested in interrogating me to find out how I felt for her younger sister and what my intentions regarding her were.

I guess I passed, since she didn't try to throw me out of the house.

Any day that I was over at the Holmes's to see Gen; Robyn insisted that I stay for dinner. She pointed out a few times that I looked like I was underfed and unhealthy, citing my pale skin tone for her arguments. While Gen looked uncomfortable at the concept of me eating normal, human food, I proved to her that it wasn't toxic to me. If my tastebuds didn't crave other sustenance, I may have even found Robyn's cooking enjoyable. However, as it was, I managed to adequately disguise my revulsion to spare her feelings.

Afternoons at the Holmes's were spent either watching a string of movies—our English teacher had ask this of us so that we could compile a report about how modern day movies had started to fall back on "Chosen One" plot lines—talking with Sam about any number of things, or else going for walks or runs around the town (Gen liked to keep in shape).

Halfway through the second school term, in mid-May, I invited Gen around to my place to finally meet Jackson and Silanna. At first, I was a little apprehensive, and I thought that they would not approve. I guess my apprehension also extended to the fact that out of the three of us in the family that had actually tasted human blood, they were newer to it than I was, and had made mistakes in their time trying to adapt. But the moment they saw Gen, broad, genuine grins broke out on both of their faces. Much as Lisa had, Silanna warmed to Gen almost instantly, and gave her a hug first thing when she was over and before she left every day. I stayed close, just in case, but I didn't let on to Gen that she was as close to death with my adoptive mother as she was with me.

Then, our afternoons alternated; some days I would go to Gen's place, and some others she would come to mine. Some of the days in between, instead of going to each either house, I would take her out somewhere for the day. On the days in between all of those, her mother insisted that we not visit each other, so that we didn't distract each other from school work _too_ much. As hard as we tried, we'd found it wasn't exactly possible to study in tandem, as we'd always find a way to distract each other.

At home, Lisa was becoming unbearable. She found any and every small excuse to talk to me; mostly about my relationship with Gen. I got the sneaking suspicion that she was keeping an informal eye on me, just in case I slipped up.

By the end of June, I was even starting to scare myself a little. I'd begun running to Gen's house in the dead of night, after I was sure that she would be asleep, and stand by the window to her bedroom, under the shade overhang to hide from any neighbours still awake and nosy. There I spent each night until sunup just watching as Gen slept.

School ended for the semester and we were blessed with a two week reprieve.

_Make it Right_ had been a standing success when I had performed it in front of the class, but to get my mark, I'd have to wait until the first week back next semester. The teacher even suggested that I play it, or something similar, at the graduation ceremony. I agreed … evasively. Gen had done an impressive piece on her violin. I knew she didn't sing well, and that wasn't really her fault—some can, some can't. But she could definitely play, and she performed a piece I recognised from one of my Corrs CDs at home. She'd get top marks for it, I was sure. Perhaps she'd even top me.

Today was an off-weather Wednesday—which meant that there would be some good sunshine followed by one hell of a storm. As such, I'd taken Gen up to Lake Vermont. To do that, I'd had to swap with Silanna for the Ranger, which was more of an off-road vehicle than my Skyline was.

Gen hadn't been too keen on the idea. I think she was still under the common misconception that direct sunlight was dangerous to me. I had a feeling that she also believed wooden stakes, crosses and holy water were also bad, but unless she brought it up, I wouldn't enlighten her. I assured her that I would be fine in the sunlight, but I wouldn't elaborate any further until we arrived at the lake.

There were clouds already on the horizon to the south; heavy, dark and foreboding. Eventually, they would catch up to us. I just hoped that I was back on the main roads before the rain started to come down, or else we might run into a bit of trouble.

When we arrived at the lake, I parked the car under a thick section of tree canopy for shade and told her to go on without me while I locked up; I'd catch up to her. I locked the Ranger, made sure that the windows were all wound up, and then took off after her. Gen was already lakeside when I got to the edge of the trees, gazing out at the shiny blue before her.

She turned to look at me, as if sensing that I'd caught up, and took a couple of steps before I held up a hand to stop her. If she came to me, it would ruin the surprise I had for her. She looked confused, but nonetheless stopped and waited where she was. I stepped forward, out from under the shade the trees provided.

Her jaw dropped all the way when she saw the change happen. I could see it too; the rays of light shining outward from me as the sunlight bounced off my skin, reflected into a brilliant rainbow of colour.

I darted forward, and stopped just before her. "You …" she started, breathless.

I smiled and took her hand to lead her back to the lake's edge. The entire time, her eyes were fixed on me, taking in the unexpectedness of the way I now appeared to her as well as seemingly waiting for something. I sat down a couple of meters away from the water's edge and pulled her gently down into my lap.

"What?" I asked her, noticing that she was still looking at me anxiously.

"I'm waiting for the fire to start," she whispered.

I actually laughed at the absurdity of the comment. "_This_ Is the real reason my kind don't go out in the sunlight," I said to her, making a sweeping gesture to indicate myself. "People would know right away that we're not the same as them. Humans don't … sparkle."

"I would have used the word 'shine' myself," Gen replied. "Wow," she breathed. She reached out with one hand and gently stroked the side of my face. I closed my eyes for the duration of the contact and pressed my cheek into her hand. "It looks like you've been sculpted by reassembling millions and millions of tiny shards of crystal," she observed.

I nodded. "I don't know exactly why we look like this in the sun. Silanna might be able to explain it, I think. But what you see of me now is the true reason behind our aversion to sunlight, why we avoid it when humans are around. Being seen like this would be like having a bullseye painted onto our back and holding up a sign reading 'Oh, by the way, I'm a vampire!' So humans eventually caught on to our staying out of the sun and assumed automatically that it was because it would kill us."

"Because the best time to avoid it is at night," Gen guessed, "which is, I'm assuming, when most of your people hunt?"

I frowned. "Not my _people_. My _kind_." The frown lightened, but not much. "Those of us that choose to live among humans … we usually stick to places that have limited direct exposure to sunlight. Places like that aren't easy to come by, especially out in the countryside, but they do exist. Dysart, Forks, London, just to name a few. Living in places like those helps to maintain the façade of being human by being seen outside during the daylight hours."

Gen leaned her head back against my chest as we sat there; gazing out across the still, blue water. "Eyes …" she murmured, reminding me that I still hadn't explained that phenomenon to her.

"Thirst," I replied. She looked at me with a curious frown. "It's an indicator of how fed we are, to put it as raw as I can. As all humans know from myth, we drain the blood from our food. It takes longer to fully absorb into our system than regular food for a human. In theory, it means that we can go up to two weeks without feeding. Any more than that and you're testing your control, pushing your limits. Leaving it too long can bring insanity. I once went a month without … back when I was … less humane. It was torture. Like everything was on fire and I couldn't put it out."

"Why did you …?"

"I was changing my appetite. I couldn't stand to destroy life anymore, no matter who it was that I was feeding from. But I couldn't think of any other way. So I figured if I could starve myself into oblivion; end my existence so I wouldn't hurt anyone else. I was crossing the country one day, livid, out of my mind, when I came across a pack of dingos. I ripped the pack in half trying to douse the fire that had taken me. When I was finished, I felt … better. The fire was still there but it was smaller, almost entirely gone. I had my strength back, my sanity. It changed me."

"So the eyes …?"

"As I said: an indicator. The less fed we are, the darker our eyes seem. So when there's no blood left in us they appear to be black."

"Ah. But you said the gold was more dominant."

"And it is. We don't push ourselves too far. Two weeks between feedings. So the blood we take has enough time to be absorbed entirely into our system before we need to … uh … top up."

"Do all vampires have gold eyes?"

"No." I said, not smiling anymore.

"What then?"

I paused. She hadn't reacted to my hint that I had once hunted humans for food. I knew I could tell her about the disturbing red eyes most vampires had; not much seemed to scare her. But if she had caught my hint, then she might then start to picture me with those eyes, and it might scare her. Part of me wanted that even, the part of me that wanted her protected _from_ me.

"Red—burgundy, really," I told her. "Kind of like the colour of a rich wine. Human blood is so pure. It's full of iron and proteins and all of the good things that regular vampires absorb into their system when they feed. Humans are the perfect blend between herbivorous and carnivorous. So that colour shows through the eyes. Feeding from animals dilutes the colour to what you've seen in me and my family, even carnivorous animals. I don't know, I guess Silanna can explain the biology of that too."

"That's … complicated; but good!" she said. "I don't think I could actually picture you with red eyes. It just wouldn't look right."

"Hmm," I replied. So she hadn't caught the hint. That was fine. I wouldn't need to volunteer that information anytime soon. Eventually, but not today.

It was pouring down rain when we got back to my place later in the afternoon. We had only spent another couple of hours at the lake before I'd called it a day. We got back into the Ranger and I raced to the nearest road and, from there, back towards home.

The drive home was full of more questions. One of them was entirely uncomfortable, and I'd wished she'd never ask it. She wanted to know if draining a person turned them, like some of the stories that she'd read. I told her that that wasn't how it worked, but I wasn't willing to tell her any more than that.

She was surprised to find out that vampires were incapable of sleep, and she asked me "Since you don't sleep in a coffin underground, then, what do you do in all that spare time?" Unwilling just then to admit that I watched _her_ sleep, I told her that I played the guitar or went hunting if the time was right, or just spent the night talking to someone else in the family. All of those were true, to an extent.

When we got out of the car, I picked Gen up, shut her door, keyed the central locking, and rushed her up into the house.

"You're shivering!" I said.

"W–well, d–d–duh!" she snapped. "I w–was just outside in t–the rain, in w–winter, w–wasn't I? N–n–no frigging mystery t–that I'm cold!"

"Sorry," I apologised. I shifted her weight in my arms so that it was more comfortable for her—in other words, so she wasn't pressed to my chest—and carried her up the stairs to the second floor.

"Lisa?" I called down the stairs as I started down the hall. "Do you still have that old heater?"

"Yes," the call came back from the ground floor. "Why?"

"If you don't mind setting it up in your room …" I replied.

"No problem."

"Thanks," I muttered. I put Gen down on her feet just outside of Lisa's bedroom door at the end of the hallway and gently nudged it open with my foot. I led her across the room to the door at the other end, leading into Lisa's en-suite.

"Where are you—?"

"You're going to go and have a nice hot shower and warm up before you catch hypothermia," I interrupted.

"Can't you just warm me up?" she protested, clutching onto my shirt collar tightly. I placed my cold, wet hand against her cheek and she shuddered visibly at the touch. "OK, so maybe that was a stupid question. What's the heater for, then?"

"Need to dry out your clothes somehow, don't we?" I replied pointedly. "You won't fit into any of Lisa's things."

"Thankfully," I heard her murmur.

I smiled. "Lisa will be up in a bit to do that for you." I led her into the bathroom; the door had already been opened. "Now hurry up and get warm, OK?"

I started to go back out, but Gen seized my hands tightly, fighting back another shudder. "Don't go," she pleaded.

"I must," I said. "It wouldn't be proper for me to stay under the circumstances. Besides that, I need to change as well. I'll be downstairs when you're finished up here, OK?"

"OK," she said weakly. I tried again to back out of the room, but she still didn't release my hands. I looked at her questioningly. She bit her lip. "One kiss—please?"

"One," I agreed with a nod. I leaned down to her and pressed my lips against hers lightly. Her lips pressed back. It only lasted a handful of seconds before I forced myself to pull away, reminded myself that she was already cold enough. There was a light flush over her face, and she was smiling.

"All warmed up," she said with a cheeky grin. "See?"

"Nice try," I said knowingly. Her face fell into a pout, but I stared her down. "Shower, now, please?" She nodded reluctantly and let go of my hands. Turning around, she walked into the en-suite and closed the door three-quarters of the way—probably assuming I would take that as an invitation and follow her.

I did … but I didn't.

I passed Lisa just outside her bedroom door. She was carrying a small, portable heater from downstairs. "Could you put her clothes near the heater after you've wrung them? Your clothes are a couple of sizes too big for her so I said we'd make sure hers were dry before she had to go home." Lisa nodded and closed the door behind her.

I proceeded to the steps and ascended them to the third floor. I rummaged through my drawers for a change of clothes and stripped off the soaked jeans and t-shirt that I had been wearing to replace them with another pair of jeans and a white shirt with long sleeves and a turtleneck. I was changed in less than half a minute, and I left my rain-soaked clothes in the laundry basket in my own en-suite before I headed back down the stairs to the ground level.

Lisa was already down there, seated in front of the television in the living room. Gen would be upstairs for a little while longer—being naturally, humanly, slower. So I went outside to the back and sat down in the wooden deckchair by the door, watching the rain fall as the storm rolled in.

Dysart! I thought to myself. Only in a place like Dysart could anyone really say that so much rain was a beautiful sight. There was no lightning yet, but the thunder had started to sweep into town. The clouds were still dark and heavy overhead, and the tumultuous rainfall they provided splattered on the ground, the bushes and trees, and the surfaces of the house's exterior.

I could honestly think of no better place in the country, or even the rest of the world, to live. No other place had Gen. No other place was this perfect for vampires like me to live … for at least a little while. I knew I wouldn't be able to stay in Dysart for too many years, not without raising some suspicions. But I could enjoy it for the few years it lasted.

I closed my eyes and continued to listen to the rain, blocking out the sounds of the TV from the living room and the shower from upstairs. Who needed a collection of music CDs when the rain and the thunder provided its own soothing melody?

"Mark," Lisa called from inside the house. I didn't like the way she spoke, though it was at an even decibel. My eyes snapped open at once and I tore myself from my reverie. "Mark, come and take a look at this."

I got up and went back into the house … reluctantly. Looking at the time on the clock in the kitchen, I realised that I had been outside for just over twenty minutes. I continued on past the kitchen and into the living room and saw that Lisa was watching the Channel 7 news. I couldn't hear the shower running.

"Another attack?" I asked. I planted myself on the loveseat. Lisa nodded.

"Double," she added. She turned up the volume on the television so that I could hear the on-scene reporter.

"_… Shocking the residents of Warwick—_" she began. Startled, I sat forward on the edge of the lounge; hanging from the reporter's every word. "_—is the brutal attack of a twenty-year-old girl and her thirty-seven-year-old mother in their own home. While police officials and the town's medical examiner's office have not released any details of the nature of the murders, they have released that the younger victim, identified as Simone Karson, has not yet been found; though they comment that the amount of blood found at the crime scene does point to the possibility that she may have suffered her mother's fate. Local residents are convinced that it is the work of the younger victim's former lover; Mark Winters._"

"What did she just say?" Lisa screeched, incredulous. She checked my eyes, even though we both knew it wasn't necessary.

"_It is alleged,_" the reporter went on, "_that the suspect's relationship with the victim did not end on amicable terms, and it is believed that Mr. Winters may have—_"

"Mark?" Gen's startled voice came from the bottom of the stairs, behind Lisa. I turned my head to look at her, the shock clear on my face. She was wrapped up in one of Lisa's bathrobes, and looked just as shocked and confused as I felt. "What's going on?" she asked.

"I haven't got the slightest idea," I said honestly.

"Well; whatever it is, it's nothing but a load of bulls—" Lisa was cut off by a knock at the front door.


	17. Chapter 15

**15. DOWN TO THE COP SHOP**

Only two types of people have ever knocked on our front door: door-to-door salespersons, and police officers. We haven't had a lot of visits from either, really. Door-to-door salespersons are … an endangered breed in a place like Dysart, and the only time we had been visited by the police was after we'd moved in. They'd wanted to welcome us to the town and let us know they were on hand if ever needed.

It was too much of a coincidence to hope that, only seconds after hearing myself named as a suspect in a double murder, that our visitors would be salespersons today. I knew before I even opened the door that it had to be the police.

Two officers had been sent out to my place, and I recognised them both. Standing in front of me and to my left was Senior Constable Robert Dodds, and to _his_ left was Constable Samuel Peterson. They were usually the town's street patrollers and could often be seen driving around in the Ford Falcon issued as their squad car, picking up graffitists or other law breakers from the streets. Occasionally, one of them visited the schools to remind children aboard neighbourhood safety, etcetera. Neither of them looked thrilled about standing on my doorstep at that particular moment.

"Good afternoon, Mark," Constable Peterson said with a curt nod. Genevieve came to my side at once and latched onto me, pulling my arm around her waist. It was a symbol more for the officers' benefit than mine—telling them to keep their hands off because I was hers. "Ma'am," Peterson added when he noticed her.

"Been watching the news today, have you Mark?" Senior Constable Dodds said with a curious arch to his bushy eyebrows.

"As a matter of fact," I said by way of admission. "I didn't think the sergeant would act so quickly on it, to be honest. I assume that either it's been on the news all day or Warwick's sergeant has been in touch." I paused, glanced at Genevieve for less than a second. "I suppose that you'll want me to come with you?"

"Afraid so," Peterson said with a glum smile. Poor guy. I could tell by his expression he had legit doubts about my involvement in this whole mess. It would suck to be him.

"Lisa …" I turned to look at her as she started to make her way to the door herself to join the conversation. She nodded to the two officers and they greeted her shortly. "Could you do me a really big favour and take Gen home for me?"

"Sure," she said calmly. I expected that she'd take both Peterson and Dodds on if they tried to haul me away in cuffs. I gave her a certain look that all three humans missed to dissuade her from that. "I'll just go and get my keys from the kitchen."

"Take mine," I murmured, too low for anyone but Lisa to hear; my lips barely moved. "Drop my car off at the station after you take Gen home."

"I'm coming with you," Gen hissed in my ear, clutching herself tighter to me.

"I don't think so," I said gently. "They only want to ask me a few questions. I've got nothing to hide"—though, with a look intended only for her, I amended that to _almost nothing_—"so you don't need to come with me. We both know that I was with you all week, so there's no real issue here. I'll meet up with you at your place tonight after I'm finished with these fine gentlemen, OK?"

"But—"

I silenced her by pressing my finger to her lips. "Please?" I insisted. Lisa was standing a couple of meters away now, twirling my key ring around her finger and pretending like she wasn't listening. Reluctantly, Gen nodded, and I turned again to Lisa. "Are her clothes dry yet?"

"She'll have to suffer with some of mine if you want her home ASAP," she said with an inconspicuous shake of the head. That conversation passed by too quick and quiet for the others to hear. Then, aloud, she said; "I'll get in touch with … mum and dad. They should be on their way home now. I'll let them know where you are."

Gen continued to stare up at me, as if doing so was going to make me change my mind and let her come with me. It wasn't going to work. I placed a hand gently on her shoulder and leaned forward to kiss her lightly on the forehead. She looked up again at me when I pulled away, like she had expected more than that, but I nodded to Lisa and she was steered back up the stairs to get dressed before they left.

When they were out of sight, I turned back to look at the two constables and sighed in feigned defeat. "Ready?" Dodds asked, gesturing towards the car.

"Absolutely," I said with fake cheer.

The trip to the station was uneventful, really. The cruiser didn't even have the security grill between the front and back seats, so I couldn't even experience mock joy out of that. And I wasn't cuffed, much to their luck if Lisa had been watching. They didn't speak the entire way there, and I didn't volunteer to either. Most of the drive, in fact, I just looked out through the window, feigning curiosity, anxiety, concern as best I could. By all appearances, I _should_ have been concerned with the slaying of another human being in my name. It didn't matter that it was Simone.

When we reached the station on Queen Elizabeth Drive, I saw another squad car parked in the lot, nearer to the front door. Other than that, it was empty.

I waited for Dodds to open the door for me before I stepped out, and then I followed them inside without a smile. Dodds and Peterson steered me down the hall into one of the interview rooms. I was half expecting them to leave the room in that relative darkness to add to the intimidation techniques police officers often resorted to for information-gathering, but they didn't. Peterson switched on the light and Dodds pulled the shades of the outer-wall window up.

I sat down on one side of the table when I was prompted to do so by Peterson. It was an aluminium table, strong enough for me to jump on top of once, maybe twice, before it buckled. But it wasn't as strong as, say, mahogany. There was a tape recorder on the other side of the desk, in front of Peterson who was now seated opposite me. It was connected through a thin cable to a small microphone sitting right in front of me. Dodds took up a would-be intimidating position near the window and lit a cigarette. I wrinkled my nose as inconspicuously as I could. If they knew of my aversion to the smell of tobacco, they'd picked the right kind of intimidation.

Not that it would work, of course. Not with me being a vampire. I could have flashed my teeth just once, just for a second, and their instincts would have had them backing out of the room in unbridled fear.

"First of all, Mark," Constable Peterson started, grabbing my attention once more. I looked back at him and hitched a grim smile into place. "I just want to let you know that you're not under arrest here. None of us think that you're responsible for this big mess down in Warwick."

"That's very comforting, Constable," I said with a smile. "I know. Procedure, right?"

"That doesn't mean we're all-too-happy about having to carry it out," Dodds piped in from the corner. OK, so maybe they were going to be good cop/good cop, instead of good cop/bad cop. I didn't mind.

"Thanks," I said. I gestured pointedly to the mike in front of me. "Will I need this?"

"Unfortunately, yes," Peterson said. "We just need you to answer a few routine questions for the record, if you don't mind. That's so we can take down your answers, type up a statement, and you can sign it to declare its accuracy."

"I don't mind at all," I said truthfully. "Fire away."

They asked the most basic of questions first. Peterson, it seemed, would be the investigator on this. "How did you know the deceased women?"

"I was involved with Simone Karson," I replied. "About four years ago … give or take a few months in either direction. We ended our relationship just before she started eleventh grade, and that was when my family and I moved up here."

Of course, I too would have been starting eleventh grade there, but I couldn't exactly let these guys know that without causing a great deal of confusion and unnecessary judgement. I just hoped that the Warwick police didn't have a record of my school attendance, or I was pretty much stuffed in my deceptions right then.

"Why did the relationship end?" Dodds asked before dragging heavily on the cigarette and blowing the smoke out through the now-open window. "Some people are alleging that it ended badly?"

"Yes, it did," I said. "But I think that's rather private."

"You don't have to go into specifics," Peterson assured me.

I nodded. "We had an argument; a serious one. I decided that continuing that relationship with the direction it was heading wasn't what I wanted and I told her as much. She wasn't interested in my … 'excuses', and started throwing punches."

"Did you throw any punches back?" Peterson asked. "For the record," he clarified in case I thought that he was hinting at my guilt. "Or, also for the record, was this argument serious enough to continue for these past four years?"

"No," I said quickly. "The most violent I got—if you could even call it that—was yelling at her when we argued. I never hit her … ever. And there's no way that the argument could have carried on because I deliberately severed all connection to her. I wasn't interested in staying in touch for _any_ reason."

"It was _that_ serious?" Peterson's eyebrows arched curiously.

"As I said before, I won't go into specifics. My parents taught me never to speak ill of the dead."

"Both of them nodded and Peterson shot a curious look at Dodds. The Senior Constable picked up with the next question. "Did you know that Miss Simone Karson filed an assault charge four years ago?" he asked from the window. He flicked his cigarette butt out through the window and then closed it, quieting the rain. I shook my head—my first lie to them, and I hated it. "There was reportedly serious bodily harm to herself; including a cracked rib, numerous bruises, and a fractured left wrist. None of this rings a bell?"

Damn it! I _was_ responsible for those injuries, but not out of anger or violence. It was completely the opposite. There was no way I could explain that believably, however. I didn't particularly enjoy lying to these men. They were honest cops, and I had a lot of respect for honest cops. "No," I said. "It must have happened after we moved. Is this going somewhere?"

"She reported the assault against another former partner of hers; one Mitchell Isling?"

My expression darkened, and not because I was forcing it. They seemed to realise the shift in my mood almost immediately and shot each other a knowing look. "If the police had caught up to him, you wouldn't be about to ask me if I knew his current whereabouts. And I'll save you the trouble; I don't know where he is. Simone would never tell me."

"Perhaps she was cautious that you might have taken matters into your own capable hands, as it wasn't the first time she'd filed assault charges against him."

I shrugged. "It's possible. I confess to some prior urgings to break his nose or something." I paused. "When did Simone and Jennifer die?"

"Yesterday afternoon," Dodds replied. "Which brings us to our next question …"

"Where were you between twelve-noon and two o'clock in the afternoon yesterday?" Peterson finished for him.

"At the Holmes residence," I said quickly.

"Robyn Holmes?" Constable Peterson asked. Then it clicked. "Ah! I see. That would have been her daughter that was so reluctant to let you come with us alone, then—the one that came up from New South Wales?"

I nodded. "Can anyone verify your whereabouts, except for young Miss Holmes, of course," Dodds added politely.

"Robyn was home early from work, and Sam had had the day off," I said. "My sister dropped me off and picked me up because the Skyline was out of gas. And I called a friend from the Holmes's landline phone at around one-thirty-ish. I'm sure your guys can trace that." Score one for the vampire's infallible memory, guys.

Peterson opened his mouth to respond when the door opened and the liaison officer from the front desk walked in and whispered in his ear. "We've got a woman outside saying that she's here to speak with you. She's got two girls with her. And there's a phone call from Warwick for Mister Winters."

That was quick; I thought. Wait. Hold on. Phone call for me?

Peterson peered back at me with a wide grin on his face. "Your alibi has just arrived," he said, as if I hadn't just overheard. I nodded curly and waited. "You can go now, but there's a call for you up at the front desk, if you've got a minute," he added pointedly.

I pushd myself up from the chair I was in and rounded the table to the open door. When I left the room I beeline-d it straight to the front desk and waited for the liaison officer to hand me the phone.

"Hello?" I started.

The voice on the other end was one that I never thought I would hear again. "_Hi, Mark,_" the older-sounding man's voice replied.

"Mister Karson!" I gasped.

"_Please, Mark. If I've told you once, I've told you … uh … more than once; call me Richard, OK?_" I nodded, but said nothing at first.

"What can I do for you, sir?"

"_Originally, I called to give my own opinion of this entire mess. I personally don't think that you could have had anything to do with this, Mark._" Richard Karson, Simone's father, now a widow, said. I heard the subtext behind his kind words, however. He really wanted to hear my voice to see if he could detect any guilt or remorse in it to confirm his worst fears. He'd been good at working out what people were really thinking just from how they spoke. He could have made a career out of it. "_I watched you and Simone very carefully when you were together, and you had nothing but the utmost respect and adoration for her. It's a shame that it didn't last. You're the kind of man I could have called son one day. I'm sorry things didn't quite work out, and I'm sorry for what we said to you when we saw you last._"

"Uh … thanks, sir," I said, uneasy. I hadn't actually _adored_ Simone. But I had cared for her quite a bit. "But you really didn't have to take the time to do that, you know."

"_It wasn't right that you were a suspect,_" he said, which I took to mean "it wasn't right that I suspected you of this atrocity in the first place".

"Thanks," I repeated. I chanced a look over my shoulder back at Gen. Her face was as white as my skin—quite the feat, even for someone as pale as she—and her mother's arm was around her shoulders comfortingly. "Would you like me to be at the funeral?" I asked more out of respect than any actual desire.

"_No, no, no, it's alright,_" Richard said. "_We're just going to have a small family thing; nothing special. You moved on with your life, Mark. There's no reason you should take the time away from that life to revisit the past._"

What? Did that mean that Simone _hadn't_ moved on with her life? Had she spent the past four years pining over losing me to her own stupidity and selfishness? As I'd said to the officers moments ago; I hated to speak ill of the dead. And that went in the same boat as _thinking_ ill of the dead. And yet, I couldn't help but think of her as pitiful, if she really had wasted those years.

"OK," I said softly.

Neither of us said anything for a moment, and I dropped my gaze as the uncomfortable silence dragged on. For a moment, I thought he'd hung up, that's how silent he was. But then I heard a muffled sob over the line and knew that he hadn't.

I could hear Robyn Holmes behind me talking quietly to Peterson and Dodds about yesterday, how I had been there from early in the morning until late in the evening. I thought about where Lisa was; how much luck she was having at getting in touch with Jackson and Silanna; wondering if she'd dropped my car off yet.

"_I hope she realises just how lucky she is,_" Richard finally said. I started.

"Excuse me?" I was taken aback, momentarily forgetting how good he was at voice analysis.

"_Whoever it is that you're with now,_" the grieving man said. "_I can tell from the way that you speak that there's someone new in your life now. I hope she realises how lucky she is to have you there for her._"

I looked over at Gen again. "She does," I said with an encouraging smile.

"_You make sure that you watch out for her as if your life depended on it._" Yeah; I thought, like I need you to tell me that when it's the Gods-given truth. "_Then, at least, one of us won't be a failure._"

"Yes—" A click told me that he'd hung up his end of the connection. "Sir …" I finished pitifully.

I gave the phone back to the desk officer and he gave me a sympathetic look as he placed it back down on the receiver. I walked slowly over to Gen and she ambushed me with kisses when I was within reach of her. Her mother watched us carefully as I held Gen tight, whispering in her ear that everything was fine.

"Thanks for coming down, Robyn," I said to her. "You didn't have to," I added.

Genevieve poked me in the ribs, but I ignored the hint. If it had been any harder, she might have hurt her finger, rather than me. "Nonsense," Robyn said sternly. "When my little girl comes home and tells me that her boyfriend is in trouble for something I know he couldn't possibly have done on a day I knew he couldn't possibly have done it, what other choice did I have?"

"OK, OK," I said gratefully.

"Bars wouldn't have held you anyway," Genevieve mumbled pointedly in such a low tone I knew she only meant for me to hear it. I shook my head and she smiled up at me, so I kissed her on the forehead.

"He wasn't in trouble at all, Robyn" Dodds said to Gen's mother. "But because he knew the victims and was implicated as a suspect, we had to ask him a few questions; that's all it was."

"You could have questioned him at home," Samantha answered hotly.

"It's OK, Sam," I said.

"Easy, Samantha," Robyn added in warning. "Thank you, Robert," she said, turning back to face Dodds. "Is Mark free to go now, or will he need to be printed?"

Both of them laughed. "He can be printed only if he thinks it'll be fun." I didn't respond, so Dodds shook his head. "He's free to go," he said with a smile. "We think we have a fair idea of who's actually responsible for this anyway; and Mark's statement only added to that suspicion."

"We'll have to ask you to come back tomorrow to sign your statement declaration," Peterson said with an apologetic wave of his right hand. "Unless you'd like to stick around for a bit longer."

"I'll be in tomorrow morning, first thing," I assured them both.

Peterson fixed Gen with a small smile. "My apologies, Miss, for any inconvenience … truly." He winked.

"Will you let me know if he's caught?" I asked quickly before Robyn could dissect the Constable's tone and get the wrong idea, much as I assume he had.

"Sure thing," Dodds promised.

"Then have a good evening, Constables, and I shall see you both in the morning."


	18. Chapter 16

**16. I MADE A MISTAKE?**

_I let the body fall heavily to the hard concrete. OK, that was a lie. With a hand firmly placed on the side of the man's head, I _shoved_ him down to the ground. There was a loud cracking sound as my prey's skull hit the concrete. I smiled cruelly to myself and licked my lips greedily._

_ Some of the boy's blood had escaped while I had been feeding from him. There were a couple of drops of the thick, red substance on my otherwise stark white singlet as well as my lips. I hadn't been too hasty while feeding, so perhaps his blood had been pumping faster than any of my previous victims; faster than I had expected and so had missed. He wasn't particularly tasty, either—too greasy. His parents—or whoever it was he was living with—definitely were not making sure he had a healthy diet._

_ The victim of my insatiable hunger this week had been Simon Samuels. His intellectually challenged street friends in the city knew him as the Double S. He had only been seventeen years old; my youngest feed yet. And if all seventeen-year-olds were that disgusting, I vowed to just kill them outright and stick with feeding on the older population. Contrarily Samuels's scent hadn't been so offending, and that had been my mistake. Then again, fear really did make them smell so much better, but not necessarily taste equally so._

_ Simon Samuels had been on trial for a week now for the rape and murder of a ten-year-old girl three weeks ago in a neighbouring town. Though there hadn't been enough definitive proof that he'd done it, everyone knew that he had. I myself had snuck down into the medical examiner's office to examine the girl's body. I'd found it lifeless, battered, bruised, broken, and absolutely _drenched_ in his scent. Humans would never have picked that up. They had no means equal to that of a vampire's olfactory senses._

_ I was lucky to catch the scent before the autopsy, though; otherwise it would have been washed away. I'd promised the tiny, lifeless body that justice would prevail, and that her butcher would not get away with what he'd done. But it had been a lie; I lie I hadn't, at the time, realised._

_ Because of the lack of evidence linking Samuels to the crime, a police constable assigned to the case had _planted_ evidence connecting him to it. I would have commended the strategy as a worthwhile endeavour—like I'd said; everyone knew Samuels was guilty—if it had worked. When the subterfuge had been discovered by the defence, the case had been thrown out of court—much to the defending attorney's (my father's) pleasure—the offending constable had been suspended pending investigation, and Samuels had been allowed to walk free._

_ Naturally, I was outraged by the outcome. I couldn't allow him to remain on the streets. He was guilty of the crime they'd accused him of; a crime worse than any others I had avenged so far. I had the only evidence that would convict him—though it wouldn't hold up in a human court of law without exposing myself for what I was, and therefore exposing my entire race. Furthermore, I had promised a little girl's lifeless body that she would get justice._

_ So justice she would get._

_ Up until that day, Samuels was the only criminal I hunted and fed from without waiting for him to try and reoffend; without waiting for him to try and prey on another innocent child's life. I guess part of that was a self preservation instinct. Children were more likely to believe the impossible of a vampire snatching away their abuser than a fully grown human was._

_ I'd followed Samuels from the courthouse, keeping to the shadows and marvelling that he had the _gall_ to walk the streets, rather than be taken home by a court-appointed driver. He slipped through the rioting mob outside the courthouse and ducked down an alleyway leading to a backstreet that would take him to the nearest train station. He was going to run while he still could. So he had _some_ intelligence after all._

_ However, he hadn't made it to that backstreet. When I'd appeared ahead of him in the alleyway, he turned and tried to run from me, knowing instinctually that he was in trouble. I jumped over him, landed in his path, and spun to aim two good kicks that shattered both of his knee caps. I wasn't going to hold back with him. I'd release the animal to vanquish him from the world forever. Samuels cried out at the pain, eliciting a smile from me as he dropped to his broken knees. He'd tried to pull a knife on me from his left shirt sleeve, and gasped in shock and disbelief when the blade snapped off the handle rather than slice through my rock hard exterior. I'd snapped his wrist so that he wouldn't try it again with another weapon._

_ At that point, he'd begun to whimper pitiably, begging me for an ounce of mercy. So I'd broken his jaw to silence that begging. I was in a frenzy now; anger and bloodlust blazing through my mind while the hungry fire burned the back of my throat mercilessly._

_ Under other circumstances, I could have made him suffer as much as he had made that little girl—Erica, her name had been—suffer. But my careless striking of his jaw had drawn blood. The bloodlust had started to win over my carefully nurtured control. My senses had clouded over, my nostrils filled with the smell of the life juices pouring from his mangled face._

_ So, instead, I'd snapped his other wrist for good measure, listening to the muffled scream of agony that tried to bubble up past the blood flowing from his mouth, and descended from behind to feast upon his neck._

_ But now … now that I was done, I was starting to regret not having exercised more control and drawn out the feeding. I did want to cause him more pain, and that far outweighed the horrid taste of his blood. I started to wish that I'd had more control, that I'd been around for a couple of decades more than I'd had, so that I could cause Samuels a lot more pain than I had; to drag out the merciless torture before killing him._

_ Nobody would care much for this boy's death. No one would miss him. He'd been a monster; the worst of all the human monsters that I'd ever destroyed. I could picture parades down Sheridan Street and into the centre of Cairns: floats, banners, throwing rice and streamers, a marching band in tow playing an upbeat melody, people on the sidewalks cheering my name._

_ My name._

_ I smiled._

_ And then I suddenly realised that I was no longer alone. I could smell the burning tobacco and paper behind me. When I turned around, I saw the shadow of someone else standing against the wall, a lit cigarette in their clearly feminine hand._

_ I frowned. Whoever it was sure didn't smell human. There was the cold, bitter trace of something like ammonia to the scent that was telltale of only a vampire. Whoever this newcomer was, they were like me—a hunter, a creature of darkness. So why were they watching me? In my past dealings with others of my kind, we'd squabbled and fought over sources of nourishment. This one wasn't interested in fighting me for a meal, or they would have tried to stop me before I'd started. They were just interested in watching me feed; watching me hurt my victim._

_ Did it give them some kind of sick pleasure?_

_ "I think," came a girl-like woman's voice, sweet and yet seductive, "that the best part of all of that was the torture you inflicted before you gave in to the hunger. Breaking his legs and hands and face; that was simply … _brutal_!" She sounded amused, and in awe of what she'd just witnessed._

_ I growled, instinctively defensive._

_ "Easy, there, tiger," she said. She took a step forward into the light and took a drag from her cigarette. She had long, blonde hair that fell in elegant curls around her face and past her shoulders. Her eyes were the colour indicative of a recent feed, but not as bright as I wagered mine would have been at that precise moment. Her face was sweet and round, almost child-like in its innocence._

_ I recognised her face and her slim features, but I knew that it couldn't be possible. I had to have been hallucinating. "They say that these things are addictive," she added, absent-mindedly waving the cigarette in front of her face._

_ "They also say that they kill," I said acidly. The woman stepped closer and her scent drifted through the air to my nose. I definitely knew it, recognised it. I had _tasted_ it._

_ Her name was Jennifer Carmichael, and she smelled faintly of roses and honeysuckle. Her scent had been much stronger when she'd been a human. I remembered having stalked her for five full city blocks after her failed trial two years ago. My father hadn't defended her, but one of his colleagues had. She'd murdered her husband and best friend when she'd discovered that they had been having a very steamy affair behind her back. She'd then hacked them to mush and been stupid enough to try and feed those pieces to her mother's dogs. It might have worked, had her mother not spotted the wedding band in the dogs' food bowl. She'd turned Jennifer into the police instantly._

_ Carmichael escaped justice on an insanity defence._

_ I didn't think that she was insane when I'd hunter her following that. Not the way she'd held herself, not the way she'd walked as she'd left the courthouse and headed home. I'd stuck with her the whole way, keeping to the rooftops to avoid being spotted. When she reached her home, she'd ducked inside, grabbed something, and then gone for another walk. Whatever she'd retrieved had been stuffed into her handbag, so I couldn't see it._

_ During her walk, she'd come across a young couple on a park bench, kissing rather passionately. Her reaction to the sight had been enough for me to possibly rethink my assessment of her mental state. She would have bludgeoned the poor young couple to death with that handbag if I hadn't gotten between her and them. She already had scored a couple of good hits before I'd stepped in, and the smell of the victims' blood was driving me insane with thirst. I'd barely had enough breath to tell them to leave as quickly as they could and go straight to a hospital._

_ Then, after they were well out of sight, I'd dashed after Jennifer and dragged her into a bush for cover as I'd fed from her._

_ Yet, here I was, two years later, staring her down after just having made another thirst-driven kill. If not for the scent wafting from her body, I might have thought her to be Jennifer's identical twin sister. But no; everyone had their own unique scent, and the scent I detected now _definitely_ belonged to Jennifer._

_ "You're dead!" I snarled._

_ She glared defiantly back at me as she dragged on her cigarette again and blew the smoke out in my direction. "So are you!" she hissed. My fingers curled into claws. What _was_ this—someone's sick idea of a joke? Hey! Let's make the vampire think he's losing his mind!_

_ "But you're _dead-_dead," I replied. "I took every single last drop from your stinking heart! You're supposed to be six feet under!"_

_ "Obviously, you missed a bit," she said with a smile. She flicked the half-finished cigarette at the wall to her left. "For I am still standing, and talking, and … _hungry_," she added with a moan of longing._

_ I narrowed my eyes in distaste._

_ "You didn't feel like sharing?" she asked in a sulky tone, wiping the smile from her face. "Well, I can't say that I actually expected you to, but an offer would have at least been good manners."_

_ I snarled. "How is this possible?"_

_ "I can only guess that you left enough for my heart to continue beating." Jennifer grinned, showing all of her teeth and flexing her fingers. "Though, judging by the way you're reacting to this knowledge, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that it wasn't intentional on your part. But if it's any consolation to you, the pain I was in after you left me was _excruciating_. I actually wished for death, towards the end."_

_ "A wish easily granted," I spat. She frowned. "And no, it's not any comfort."_

_ "Ah, well; we can't have everything we want, I suppose."_

_ With a snort of barely suppressed rage, I turned to the wall of the building to my left and leapt at it. When I touched it, I sprang high to the opposite wall, and then back again. Flipping once like an acrobat in the air, I landed hard on one knee on the roof of the building I'd touched against first. Jennifer was beside me a second later._

_ "What do you want from me?" I demanded hotly, turning to face her. "Do you want an apology? Well, you're not going to get one of those. I'm not sorry that I attacked you, and I'm not sorry that I tried to kill you."_

_ "Hardly," she said. "I should actually be thanking you for this … gift." I snarled dangerously at the word and she flinched in response. Then her lips curled up into a small half-smile. "I want you."_

_ "What?" I had to have heard wrong. She had to be kidding. I reassessed: _that_ was the worst joke in history._

_ "Well, more accurately, I want to learn from you. I want to be taught by you," she clarified. "I've survived—adequately—for the past couple of years, but I've watched you for a little while now and I can see how sloppy I've been in comparison. I could be better than I currently am. I could be … different."_

_ "And why," I started, "would I teach the likes of you? You were already a danger to society as a human, and now you're even more a danger because you no longer _are_ human—which in itself is unforgiveable."_

_ "Because this chance of a new life that I've been granted has given me the desire to be different." The look in her eyes was unreadable. I couldn't tell if she was telling me the truth, or only what she thought I wanted to hear so that I would agree to help her become more dangerous. I scoffed and began to walk across the rooftop to the other side._

_ "Humans say that," I muttered. "Lies. It's always lies."_

_ "Of course it's lies when _humans_ say it," she replied defensively. "_They_ do not have the same capacity for change that we do. _They_ do not have an eternity with which to accomplish it. _They_ only have sixty or seventy years in their pitiful excuses for lives. _We_ have the capacity—and the time—to change our ways."_

_ Still, her eyes were unreadable; passive and calm. I jumped off the edge of the building in a high arc and landed on the next one on both feet. She followed._

_ "Humans have an enormous capacity for change. They are not fuelled by the same thing that drives our kind," I said, walking again. I was rather reluctant to count her in that same generalisation in which I belonged, but the evidence at this point was undeniable. "What they lack is the _will_ to change. It was your problem as a human. You escaped from justice for your crimes and instead of learning from that mistake; you went right back into the world and tried again. But that same lack of willpower is something that a lot of us also lack."_

_ I, of course, included myself into _that_ generalisation. For the past year, the urge to kill and feed off humans has been as strong as it had ever been since the dawning of my new life. However, the _desire_ to kill was waning. Samuels was the exception. I was deriving less and less pleasure with each criminal that I took down, regardless of how heinous their crimes had been. Again, Samuels was the exception._

_ But while the idea of being an interstate vigilante was beginning to lose its appeal, with no other source of food available to me I had no way to wean myself from the habit. It worried me some to think of what my brother Brett might say if I admitted as much to him. It was he, after all, that had suggested that if I needed to feed off humans I might as well hunt those that had given up their right to live._

_ "I have both the capacity and the willpower to change," Jennifer said. "As a mortal, I did terrible things—"_

_ "Which is precisely why I'm hesitant to believe a word that you say," I pointed out unashamedly. "You're a liar and a murderer."_

_ "I was not finished speaking!" she snapped. Her eyes flashed dangerously, but I didn't back off. Compared to me, she might as well still have been a newborn. "As a mortal, I did terrible things. I would have continued to do those terrible things if you had not done something about it. You saw that I was going to kill those humans at that park and you gave me a new life." I opened my mouth to protest. "I know, I know; it's not what you intended for me. But, intentions aside, that's what you did. You gave me a second chance, a chance to correct the flaws of my being and live a better life. That's why I'm so willing to change. What good is a wasted second chance?"_

_ I stopped in my tracks and looked her dead in the eyes. They were still unreadable. Damn it! I narrowed my eyes just a little, hoping that it would allow me the insight to see past the façade, past the lies, and see the deception I expected to see in her words._

_ "You wish to learn from me?" I clarified. She nodded only once. "Why me? Why not from another … vampire?" I was still a little uncomfortable even thinking the word, let alone saying it aloud._

_ It seemed that she'd never made the connection between her new life and all the old myths. "Is that what we are?" she whispered._

_ "Answer the question," I deflected._

_ She crossed her arms haughtily. "I told you; I have been watching you. I have not been watching someone else. In fact, you're the only other _vampire_ that I've ever seen, let alone know of."_

_ "Why have you been watching me?"_

_ "You made me what I am." Stating the blatantly obvious didn't score her popularity points with me._

_ "So?" I challenged._

_ "So … what better teacher than one's creator?" Jennifer smiled mischievously, and again I felt distrust bubble to the surface, but _still_ could not see any deception. "Children always learn the basics from their parents before leaving the nest to perfect the technique."_

_ I growled. "I am _no one's_ parent!"_

_ "OK, maybe that wasn't the best analogy to use, then. But you get the general point, don't you?" I snorted again and jumped to the next building form where I was._

_ I turned and was looking again into her burgundy eyes, darkened only a little. "When was the last time you fed?" I asked her plaintively._

_ "About five days ago," she said with a triumphant smile._

_ I was actually surprised. That early into her immortal life of drinking blood, she should have had less control over her instincts. She was no newborn, but new vampires weren't exactly known for possessing such restraint if they had been on their own since their awakening. I hadn't had that much restraint at her age. I had been feeding almost every third night. Then again, at the time my sources of food were more plentiful than the criminals I now hunt—corpses, dead for only seconds or minutes before I'd gotten to them. The taste of that was perhaps worse than even Simon Samuels._

_ "How much longer can you go without a feeding?" I asked her._

_ "I can, maybe, put it off for another few days," she replied. "Like I said, I've been watching you. I've noticed you tend to leave it for more than a week and I've been trying to emulate that. I've had some mixed success."_

_ So that explained it. "Meet me here in two nights, and I will …" I paused. "I will guide you."_

_ "You won't regret it!" she said with a wide grin._

_ And then she dropped over the side of the building to the sidewalk below and was gone._

_ "I bet that I will," I growled._


	19. Chapter 17

**17. CONFESSING MY FEELINGS**

That memory had been triggered by something I'd see before; a strange blur along the side of the road that was blonde atop black and brown. It reminded me a little of Jennifer. The memory had lasted only seconds in the human world; nowhere near long enough to disrupt my driving home. As it turned out, Lisa had dropped my car off, and I was driving Gen back home behind her mother's Commodore.

By the time we reached Gen's house, she was already half asleep in the passenger seat. I carried her inside and offered to take her to her room so that she could rest, but she protested and insisted that she stay with me. So I settled for the living room instead and sat down in the single-seater lounge chair with Gen sideways in my lap. Her mother and Samantha sat on the sofa opposite, watching us uncomfortably.

I knew they all wanted the full story of what exactly was going on. I could read it in each of their faces. They wanted to know how I knew the victims of the latest attack—which I was now convinced was a vampire attack—and how I couple possibly be considered a suspect. Gen, half asleep but fighting to keep herself awake and alert, fidgeted with my top.

"I suppose …" I started. "I suppose that you want to know how I got wrapped up in all of this." Samantha and Robyn both nodded shortly, whereas Gen just shrugged indifferently—she'd seen on the news at my place that I had a connection to the victims.

"Simone Karson, one of the victims, was my ex-girlfriend. My family and I lived in Warwick for a couple of years. My relationship with Simone didn't end so well, to say the least." I watched Gen absently pick a ball of lint from my collar. "So, naturally, it seems that some rather silly people got it into their heads that I was responsible for whatever happened to her and her mother."

"Stupidity would be a more accurate way of describing those people. You're no murderer!" I kept my eyes on Gen when her mother said that, so that she wouldn't see the reproachful look in my eyes. None of them, not even Gen it seemed, knew that I had once taken lives to keep myself alive in the past. Eventually, I did intend for Gen to know that part of my past. I didn't have a reason to keep it from her forever. It wouldn't be comfortable to relive it all, but if our relationship was going to work, there could be no secrets between us.

Well … no secrets save but one.

"Yeah," I said. "Constables Peterson and Dodds assured me that they were just as convinced about my innocence as you are. But it's still procedure for them to have questioned me. I knew the victims. They needed to cover that side of it."

"Did you love her?" Gen asked suddenly, and unexpectedly. I wanted to frown, but it would have been rude considering the seriousness of the question. Instead, I settled for a grim expression.

I would have preferred that she ask that particular question in private, rather than springing it on me when her mother and older sister were present, looking on, waiting for my answer. All of them waited for my response, though Samantha and Robyn looked less obvious about it. Way to put me on the spot, love; I thought to myself sullenly.

Rather than just saying "no", I decided to be diplomatic _and_ honest. "I thought I did at the time," I answered, looking her in the eyes as I said it. "But as the relationship went on, I realised that what I felt for her wasn't love; more like a sort of dependence. It was one of the reasons it ended badly between us; she couldn't—no, she _wouldn't_ accept that."

"Oh," Gen said softly.

"Who were you talking to on the phone?" Robyn asked to break the following silence.

"Simone's father. He called the station to put a word in for my defence. Apparently, he found it unacceptable that I was being perceived as a potential suspect in the case. When the desk officer told him I was being questioned, he asked to speak to me to let me know that."

"Sounds like a good man," Robyn said.

I nodded, and Gen stirred in my arms. "I'm going to bed," she said quietly. "After all of today's excitement and drama, I'm kind of beat." She kissed me on the cheek, lingering only long enough to whisper "window tonight" to me. I let her go, and watched her until she was out of sight down the hallway.

"He wanted to give me some advice, also," I continued, getting back on track after I heard Gen's door close softly behind her. "He wanted to remind me that it's my job to be there for Gen all the time and keep her from harm's way. I think he feels guilty that he wasn't there to protect those he loves, and didn't want me to have to go through the same thing."

There was a couple of seconds of silence where I realised the slip I'd made. "You … _love_ my Genevieve?" Robyn whispered, clearly caught off-guard. I hadn't used the word in front of her or Samantha before when discussing my feelings for Gen. Gen herself told me many times that she didn't need the constant reminding, but I felt that it would be good for her to hear it often.

"Yes," I said after another moment to process the situation. "I love her very, very much."

Samantha snickered. "Oh, to see the look on her face if she'd stayed a little longer to hear that," she said with a laugh. "I'd bet everything that I owned that she would have gone as red as a tomato. Hold up; I'll go and get her back here so you can say it again."

"You'll do no such thing!" Robyn scolded. I thanked her with a single look. "Let your sister sleep. If Mark can so freely tell us that, I can only assume he's already said it to her enough times." She looked to me for confirmation and I gave it to her in the form of a weak smile.

"Does she love you?"

"Samantha!"

"I don't know," I said, suddenly uncertain. Yes, it was true that she had said as much to me, and to herself in her sleep when she didn't know that I was outside watching through her bedroom window. But in comparison to me, she was still very young. Perhaps, like my own failed relationship with Simone, she _thought_ that it was love. Perhaps she had a crush on me because I was something new, and different, and … dangerous?

"Don't be so silly, boy," Robyn chastised. "Of course she does! It's all in the eyes. The way she looks at you; it's unmistakeable. You'd have to be a half-blind parrot not to be able to see it." Samantha snickered.

"My experience with women _is_ limited," I admitted.

"That's just an excuse," Robyn countered, "and not a very good one at that. The next time you look into her eyes, you come to me and you tell me that you can't see it." She shoved Samantha gently in the shoulder. "Go start dinner, will you?" It wasn't a question. Samantha got up from the couch, winked slyly at me, and then stalked off to the kitchen, grumbling. "Now, will you be staying for dinner?"

"I wish I could," I lied. "Lisa should have gotten in touch with the parentals by now, so they're likely to have raced back home at top speed to hear my explanation about all of this mess. I really should be there to beat Lisa to the punch."

That last part was the truth.

"OK, dear," Robyn said. She sighed heavily as she stood up. I followed suit. "Will you tell them I said 'hi' at least? And invite them over for dinner some time for me. It's long overdue that I meet these parents of yours."

"Will do," I promised on both counts. "Could you also do something for me … if it's not too much to ask?"

"Name it."

"Don't wake her for dinner," I said. "She's had a pretty full day today."

"That's fine. She can always reheat her dinner if it gets cold before she wakes herself. But you're going to have to have a serious conversation with her soon. After what you just said about your relationship with Simone, I'm certain that Gen is having her doubts about your feelings for her." I nodded and was escorted to the front door. Robyn held it open as I crossed the threshold. "See you tomorrow, dear."


End file.
